A reminder of what we have lost

Or, more exactly, what we have given away. Thrown away. Rejected in a mad rush of jingoism and fear manipulated in the pursuit of their own power by a mangy cabal of despicable, self-interested liars soaked in their own bloodlust and delusions of greatness.

Look at it. And remember. And think of what those same people would say of us today.

What's Dunne is done

In July, I presented the Dipwad of the Year Award to one Stephen Dunne of Boston, Massachusetts, who sued the state Board of Bar Examiners and the state's Supreme Judicial Court for $9.75 million because, he said, he failed his bar exam because he refused to answer a question about property rights in a divorce case. Y'see, the people in the scenario were "Mary" and "Jane" and

[t]hat, Dunne says, made the question "morally repugnant and patently offensive" and showed that the Massachusetts state government is "purposely-advancing Secular Humanism's homosexual agenda." (Reminder in case anyone has forgotten: Same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts.)

Well, now comes the news via Americablog that Dunne wants to decline the award: On Saturday, the Boston Herald said that Dunne has informed federal court that he wishes to withdraw his suit.

His excuse was that the version of the bar exam presented this year did not include the question that got his bigotry gland inflamed, a "corrective action" he claimed as a victory. The fact that the Board makes it a practice to not repeat questions in successive years, of course, had nothing to do with the question's absence. Of course.

Sorry, Mr. Dunne. Even if the Dipwad Award could be returned, the lame excuse you came up with for being such a loser would just get it re-awarded.

A lesson

A lesson, that is, in how to miss the obvious.

Just days after Osama bin Laden released a video tape - his first since 2004 - White House aide Frances Fragos Townsend went on two Sunday talk shows to call him "virtually impotent." She was, AP said in its lede, "seemingly taunting" bin Laden. While some will equate (in fact, some have already equated) this with Bush's infamous "bring it on," I call bullshit.

This wasn't "taunting" of bin Laden, it was an attempt to outflank the chorus of "Hey, yeah, why is he still around?" that sprang up in response to the video, to silence the "get him dead or alive" reminders beginning to rise. The White House wants to insist he's not worth worrying about. Notice that when Bush commented on it, he said it was proof that it's a dangerous world but never mentioned bin Laden by name. By failing to see this, the media and through them the public are being gamed yet again.

But I have to add that in one sense, the White House is right: I don't think bin Laden himself is particularly important except as a symbol and in that role a dead martyr can serve every bit as well as a live leader. In response to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, I said, against conventional wisdom of the time, that

I don't believe it will really change things on the ground in Iraq, either politically or in terms of security, except perhaps in the short run.

I feel safe in saying that the only part of that which has proved wrong is the last phrase: It didn't matter even in the short run. I feel the same way about bin Laden now as I did about Saddam then, that he is an evil man who has overseen mass murder and should take his place in the dock, but his capture or death would make very little, if any, difference. Someone would take his place and I fully expect a slew of "bin Laden Brigades" would pop up.

So I'm a little dismayed at what I think is emotional overinvestment among the left in bin Laden's status as a fugitive, as if he is the key to the entire threat of terrorism - and yes, there is a threat, even as it's overplayed by the administration in its pursuit of untrammeled power.

Yes, go after Bush for his earlier failures, such as at Tora Bora. But stop coming across - and some among us surely do - like the best course of action now is to pull troops out of Iraq only to slam them into the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Protect me from my friends...

...the saying goes, I can protect myself from my enemies.

In the midst of all the accusations of arms and other supplies coming into Iraq from Iran, one exhibit has been the Czech-made body armor found on killed or captured insurgents. According to the Sunday Herald (UK),

US Army and FBI investigators probing how the Czech flak jackets came into the hands of Iraqi insurgents compiled an impressive dossier, complete with the serial numbers of vests seized from radicals. Then they turned to Prague for help to uncover the Czech end of the presumed smuggling ring.

The Czech Republic's organized crime squad investigated and learned that the vests had been part of a

consignment of 6000 flak jackets had been manufactured by a Czech defence department-approved firm in Jevicko, northwest Moravia, and legally exported to Baghdad, [Pavla] Kopecka[, a spokeswoman for the Czech police headquarters,] said. ...

The stark and unpalatable truth facing the Americans is that Iraq's police force, infiltrated by Shia militias, death squads and al-Qaeda-linked radicals, must have handed over weapons and protective vests to insurgents.

This is only going to get worse. Someone, I don't recall who, recently noted that a central reason for the "improvements" in Anbar province is that the US has essentially switched sides and instead of seeing Sunni insurgents as the main enemy is now concerned with Shiite militias. It's become as clear as it can be short of a signed, handwritten confession that despite whatever they may say, the real goal of the (by comparison) saner members of the Executive Branch is no longer "winning," whatever that might mean in this context. The goal is not losing at least until they are safely out of the range of blame. And so the deaths will continue for no purpose other than political posturing.

A half step forward, a half step back

In May, Dick Durbin acknowledged that the line the White House was peddling to the public in the run-up to the Iraq War was contradicted by the classified intelligence being given to the Intelligence Committees - but he had kept silent. "I couldn't do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy," he said. "We can't walk outside the door" and say White House PR flacks are telling the public things he knew weren't true.

I slammed him bitterly, declaring

God dammit, why the hell not? ...

Why the hell couldn't you "walk outside the door" and tell the people, tell the world, that the White House was populated by a cabal of power-hungry liars? You knew, you knew, you knew that the country, your country, was being lied into a war. A war, Senator, not some pet pork barrel project of some bureau in the Executive Branch. A war.

But you kept silent. You kept your mouth shut. Because propriety, because protection of your privileged position, was more important than truth. More important than justice. More important than decency. More important than human lives.

The bad taste left in my mouth by that has not lessened in the months since. Durbin has been one of the white hats on several issues (such as the pro-labor RESPECT Act) but it's not enough to wear the white hat only when there is no risk to you. It is rare that any of us are in the position that our one action could make a real difference in a larger issue. When given that chance - as Durbin was - there are higher demands on conscience than those imposed by an oath of silence. That none of us know if we would have done better than Durbin did does not lessen his guilt, it merely acknowledges the possibility of our own.

Still, credit where it's due and Reuters for Friday gave me cause to offer some:

The No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate said on Friday he could no longer vote for funding the war in Iraq unless restrictions were attached that would begin winding down American involvement there.

"This Congress can't give President (George W.) Bush another blank check for Iraq," said Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin, who has always opposed the war but until now voted to fund it.

"I can't support an open-ended appropriation which allows this president to continue this failed policy," he said in a speech at the left-leaning Center for National Policy.

Well, congratulations to Durbin for his commitment to voting against funding without restrictions. It's only a half-step because the "restrictions" he envisions apparently allow for maintaining who knows how many US troops in Iraq for who knows how long for "counterterrorism" and training, but at least instead of just talking about limits he insists he won't vote for funding without them. So it's only a half-step, but it is a half-step forward.

But as it always seems to be with him, just like when he voted against the war while keeping silent about the lies, just like when he denounced torture of prisoners at Gitmo only to cravenly apologize, he can't let something good stand on its own.

Durbin said he was increasingly troubled by his votes to pay for military operations [in Iraq].

"Now I just realized I can't do this. It's perpetuating a policy that is taking more American lives. We have to wind this war down," Durbin said, adding he would not use his leadership post to demand other Democrats follow his lead. [Emphasis added.]

So great. One vote, good. But that's all it is. No more. No more even though it could be more. "Oh, it's just me, I won't push anybody else." That is just another type of silence when being vocal is what's required. When it comes to Iraq, the Democratic leadership continues to insist on being no such thing.

Another belated footnote

Updated This one to this post which made reference to the case of Dr. Anna Pou, who a grand jury refused to indict on a charge of the mercy killings of nine patients trapped in a hospital in the wake of Katrina. It's from AP for Saturday:

The owners of a nursing home where 35 patients died after Hurricane Katrina were acquitted Friday of negligent homicide and cruelty charges for not evacuating the facility as the storm approached.

The jury took about four hours to acquit Sal and Mabel Mangano, the husband-and-wife owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, just outside of New Orleans.

They had faced 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the elderly or infirm after the patients drowned - some in their beds - when the monster hurricane swept through the area. ...

The couple were the only people to face criminal charges stemming directly from Hurricane Katrina. More than 30 lawsuits have been filed against them by patients injured at the nursing home and the families of people who died there.

Prosecutors argued the home should have evacuated as the storm approached, but defense lawyers countered that the area had not flooded before and the Manganos thought riding out the storm was the safer choice for their residents. The fact that Gov. Kathleen Blanco testified there had been no evacuation order doubtless was also helpful to the defense.

I'm not familiar with the details of the case, but the fact that the acquittal came back so fast - and yes, four hours for a case like this is fast - indicates that the jury discovered itself to be pretty much of one mind right at the start and the prosecution couldn't have had much of a case.

I really have to wonder what the purpose of these prosecutions (of Dr. Pou and the Manganos; originally, two nurses were also charged) was. Distraction? A publicity-hungry prosecutor or two? Trying to keep the families of the dead, screaming for someone's blood, off officials' backs? What? Certainly the record - two dropped charges, one acquittal, one failure to even get an indictment - doesn't speak to calm discovery of actual criminal behavior on anyone's part. So what were they about?

Updated with another Wife-Generated Footnote: I'm told by the person across the table that three factors that may have gone into the decision to prosecute are that other nursing homes in the area did evacuate, the Manganos themselves left the city, leaving the staff to deal with whatever ensued, and if people in the community had not gone in to help, more might have died.

Still, that seems a thin reed on which to hang 35 charges of negligent homicide and, again, the rapid acquittal points to a weak case for the prosecution. This actually pushes me a bit more in the direction of suspecting the case was pursued by officials in order to get grieving families looking for closure off their backs.

(Closure? Yes, a type of it. Imagine you had a parent who died there. They died, drowned, pointlessly, helplessly, while you were somewhere else. A normal human reaction would be guilt - "I should have been there." But what if instead they died the same way but as the result of someone else's negligence? What if the failure wasn't yours but theirs? And what if they got punished for it? Can you understand why some people could find that more comforting or at least less troubling?

Yes, it's not rational. Emotions never are. It's not their nature or their job.)

A belated footnote...

Updated ...to this post about the ACLU's victory over part of the Patriot Act. It turns out that, the New York Times tells us today, that

[t]he F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” - the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

Weren't we told that it was silly to worry about this kind of wide-ranging poking around because the FBI wouldn't do it there was no real point to it? That's right, we were! (Original article here.)

While refusing to say what data it had obtained, the FBI did insist the search

was limited to people and phone numbers “once removed” from the actual target of the national security letters....

That's not incredibly reassuring and not really indicative of any restraint on the feds' part: Assume for the sake of illustration that everyone has 10 "associates" - people, groups, businesses, whatever - on the call list obtained from the phone company. So start with one, the target. That yields 10 more names. Going one step further means getting the names of the 10 that each of those 10 called. So now the FBI has the phone records not of one person but of 11 and the names and phone numbers of 90 more. (That's assuming one of those that each of that next group of 10 called was the original target, so each produced nine new names.) Not one person, but 101. And remember, none of these need be suspected of any wrongdoing; the only requirement is that the original target be somehow "relevant" to a terrorism investigation in the eyes of some FBI supervisor.

The requests for such data showed up a dozen times, using nearly identical language, in records from one six-month period in 2005 obtained by a nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The F.B.I. recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group. The boilerplate language suggests the requests may have been used in many of more than 700 emergency or “exigent” national security letters. Earlier this year, the bureau banned the use of the exigent letters because they had never been authorized by law.

So doing what we were assured there was little point in doing was routine enough to employ boilerplate language in illegal demands for personal information. I feel such a surge of confidence in our federal law enforcement agencies.

The FBI maintains the practice of demanding information on a target's community of interest has been stopped "pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy." The question then becomes just who is going to develop this policy and who is going to have "oversight." Who is there we can trust with this kind of authority? The White House (any White House)? The FBI itself? The rubber-stamp FISA court? Who? I don't know about you, but I can't think of anyone.

Footnote: According to

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and a former researcher for AT&T ... the telecommunications companies could have easily provided the F.B.I. with the type of network analysis data it was seeking because

the companies themselves have been doing it for years. What a wonderful corporatocracy we inhabit.

Another Footnote: After reading this post, my wife suggested the ACLU should be one one to develop the new policy and do the oversight. Maybe - but if they got in that tight with the feds, given all we know about the corrupting nature of power, could we really still trust them? It's kind of like the line - I think it was Gore Vidal's - that anyone who wants to be president should be automatically disqualified.

Updated to add the link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the second footnote and to clean up some garbled language.

Speaking of Darfur ...

... I'm reminded of something about being lead down the garden path. The New York Times for Friday reported that

[t]he United Nations and Sudan announced Thursday that the government and Darfur rebel leaders would hold peace negotiations next month to seek an end to a conflict that many in the world contend constitutes genocide.

The talks, under the auspices of the United Nations and the African Union, will begin on Oct. 27 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.

In a statement, the government of Sudan pledged “to contribute positively to secure the environment for the negotiations.” Sudan also promised to “facilitate the timely deployment” of the new 26,000-member African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force, which it agreed this summer, under intense international pressure, to accept.

Oh my dear word, how many times have we been down this road? How many times have we heard promises from the government of Sudan that proved to be as worthless as their souls?

In April 2004 the government agreed to a ceasefire in Darfur and almost immediately broke it repeatedly, so much so that in May 2004 a report to the UN Security Council charged Sudan with pursuing a "scorched earth policy" in Darfur.

In June 2004 Sudan promised to disarm the janjaweed militia doing most of it's dirty work in Darfur. Despite a few PR presentations, it never actually made any serious move toward that end.

In July 2004, Sudanese officials were reliably reported to be threatening people in refugee camps in Darfur to keep silent about their experience and the deplorable conditions in the camps when inspectors passed through.

In August 2004, Sudan promised to abide by a July UNSC resolution seeking to end the conflict but within a few weeks was breaking the ceasefire, blocking the arrival of humanitarian relief, and resisting the emplacement of African Union peacekeepers. It continues to this day to trumpet its support for peacekeepers while dragging its feet on their emplacement and enforcement ability.

In November 2004 yet another ceasefire was declared; by January 2005 it, too, was history.

In July 2005 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights charged Sudan with maintaining "a climate of impunity" for Sudanese police and soldiers who raped civilians in Darfur.

In March 2007 a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council accused Sudan of orchestrating human rights abuses and war crimes in Darfur. At around the same time, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir wrote to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon claiming support for the AU and the UN and for humanitarian aid to Darfur - but weasled out of a November 2006 accord under which Sudan agreed to the deployment in Darfur of a joint UN-AU force.

So you'll have to excuse me if I'm not the least impressed by this latest round of smiley-face.

In fairness I have to add that the professional diplomats, determined to make nice even in the face of that record, remain at least outwardly optimistic. Supervising the talks will be Jan Eliasson, Secretary General Ban's special representative for Darfur. Eliasson

noted that Libya had helped in two meetings, in April and July, to convince reluctant rebel leaders, some of whom are based in Tripoli, of the need to seek a political solution.

A major test of Thursday’s proposal will be how many people from the rebel side show up, but Mr. Eliasson said the time was right for taking the initiative. “The common denominator was that all sides have realized now that there is no military solution,” he said.

Back in December 2004, I ended one of the above-linked posts this way:

Isn't there a point, isn't there a time, and dammit, isn't that point and time here and now, when you look at what's around you, when you look at the hunger and death and fear and blood and exhaustion and pain and cruelty - when you stop and say "What is worth this?" I don't care which side you're on, isn't there some moment when you say "My cause is not worth the price?" When comes that moment, when comes the labored breath that simply says "Enough!" and turns to burying the dead?

That's the question I ask both sides now - is it worth it? Or, more exactly, how can it be worth it?

I can only hope Mr. Eliasson is right in him conviction and justified in his confidence and I can't help but admire the strength (if not the blessed naiveté) of those who manage to maintain their optimism in the face of the record. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Footnote: The toll in Darfur is an estimated 200,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless. Sudan claims the death toll is only 9,000. Eliasson has his work cut out for him.

Oh, no!

The tribal wars in Democratic Republic of Congo had been called the world's worst humanitarian crisis, surpassing even Darfur. Over 3 million killed, over 2 million more driven from their homes. A series of quickly-broken ceasefires had slowed the horror but not stopped it. This report from Reuters raises the risk that another cycle is about to start:

Renegade Congolese General Laurent Nkunda said on Friday the Congolese army had attacked his position, breaking a fragile ceasefire negotiated by United Nations mediators in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

"I have told MONUC (the U.N. mission in Congo) that we were attacked this morning in Rutshuru. They say they are in contact with the Congolese army to ask them to stop," Nkunda told Reuters by telephone.

"I think it can be stopped," he said.

U.N. mediators announced the ceasefire on Thursday after nearly two weeks of fighting in volatile North Kivu province in which rebels loyal to Nkunda have battled U.N.-backed government troops, forcing thousands of refugees to flee.

The deal was announced as thousands of Tutsi fighters loyal to Nkunda appeared to have turned the tide on government forces, and were pressing ahead towards the provincial capital Goma.

I hope Nkunda is right, I also hope he is telling the truth and not simply pulling a Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to renew fighting when he thinks he has the advantage. There has been enough blood spilled there to satisfy the bloodlust of generations.

Oh, yes!

In 2004, in response to a suit brought by the ACLU, US District Court Judge Victor Marrero in New York ruled that the Patriot Act provisions related to National Security Letters

violate the Constitution because they amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. He found free-speech violations in the nondisclosure requirement, which for example, disallowed an Internet service provider from telling customers their records were being turned over to the government.

After he ruled, Congress revised the Patriot Act in 2005, and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directed that Marrero review the law's constitutionality a second time.

And he's ruled the same way again. AP for Friday has the word:

A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible "far-reaching invasions of liberty."

The issue was not the NSLs themselves, which allow federal agents to obtain financial, telephone, and Internet records without a warrant, but the ability of the government to keep the demands secret, even to the point of requiring businesses and organizations presented with such demands to keep silent about them under pain of imprisonment. With NSLs, AFP notes in its report on Marrero's decision,

[i]nstead of going to court to get approval, agents only have to show their supervisor that the information is "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

That is, the person whose records are demanded by the feds doesn't have to be suspected of any wrongdoing or even be a target of an investigation, and no court is involved - the only requirement is that some supervisor or another decides the information is "relevant." That sort of wide-reaching definition is an open door to abuse, which of course is exactly what happened.

A March government report showed that the FBI issued about 8,500 national security letter, or NSL, requests in 2000, the year prior to passage of the USA Patriot Act. By 2003, the number of requests had risen to 39,000 and to 56,000 in 2004 before falling to 47,000 in 2005. The overwhelming majority of the requests sought telephone billing records information, telephone or e-mail subscriber information or electronic communication transactional records.

That is, from 8,500 in one year to an average of over 47,000 per year. What's more,

in hundreds of cases [the FBI] broke the rules to get them by either seeking information not permitted under the act or else not getting sufficient approval, a congressionally-requested report found.

In the wake of Marrero's 2004 ruling,

Congress rewrote the law in 2005 to give people the right to challenge the gag order....

But the FBI was given the final word on whether it is safe to remove the gag order, something Marrero said Thursday "offends the fundamental constitutional principals of checks and balances and separations of powers."

Allowing the provision to stand would run the risk, Marrero said in his 103-page ruling, that

the constitutional barriers against governmental abuse "may eventually collapse, with consequential diminution of the judiciary's function, and hence potential dire effects to individual freedoms."

In that event, he said, the judiciary could become "a mere mouthpiece of the legislature."

Marrero stayed the effect of his ruling for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal. Which of course they will. However, Marrero is wrong in one way: The ultimate intent in such an appeal is not to make the judiciary a "mere mouthpiece of the legislature." It's to make it a mere mouthpiece of the executive.

Star Geek: The Original Series

One of the enduring mysteries for astronomers had been the process by which galaxies form. One common notion had been a top-down arrangement in which enormous clouds of primordial gas gradually coalesced under their own gravity. Another idea has been a "building block" notion under which groups of small galaxies merge to form larger ones. Now that second idea has new support.

Astronomers have found nine of the faintest, tiniest and most compact galaxies ever seen.

The little objects are hundreds to thousands of times smaller and vastly younger than our Milky Way....

"These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe," said Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

Pirzkal said their petite mass, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope and confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, shows these galaxies are some of the smallest building blocks of the universe, aside from stars themselves.

These tiny galaxies appear to have been formed when the universe was only 1 billion years and consist of hot blue stars only a few million years old, still in their youth. (The brightest, hottest, stars use up their nuclear fuel the quickest and thus have the shortest lifespans, about 10-20 million years. A typical yellow star like our Sun will go for about 10 billion years.)

The development of three of the galaxies appears to be slightly disrupted; rather than taking on a rounded-blob shape typical of the youngest galaxies, they're stretched into tadpole-like forms. Astronomers think it may signal their first fusion with neighboring galaxies to form larger, cohesive structures.

And maybe, maybe, astonomers are a step closer to knowing how things got to be the way they are.

The Martian Chronigeeks

A sigh of relief from NASA, as covered by AP a few days ago.

They're old and dirty, but NASA's Mars rovers are back in the exploration business after enduring a lengthy Red Planet dust bowl that blocked most of the sunlight they need for power.

With skies gradually brightening, the solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity recently resumed driving and other operations that had been suspended during the dust storm.

Spirit and Opportunity are now in day 1,307 and day 1,287, respectively, of their original 90-day missions.

Footnote: Properly, that should be "sols," or Martian days, which are 39 minutes longer than Earth days. So the original mission, 90 sols, was about 92¹/₂ days. Spirit has been going for about 1,342¹/₂ days and Opportunity, 1,322 days. In case you cared.

Out of touch

Short-sightedness and parochialism threaten to derail the best chance we've had so far to put a dent in the noxious spread of unreliable, crash-prone, highly-hackable touchscreen voting. HR811, originally sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), unfortunately does not ban the suckers outright, but

would require a voter-verified paper record for every vote cast nationwide beginning in 2008. It also would mandate routine random audits in most federal races and would designate paper ballots as the ballots of record for audits or recounts.

I certainly have expressed my doubts about touch-screen voting enough times before, so my concern about the prospects of this bill should be no surprise. (Sidebar: There is some overlap between those two links because I tend to use the phrases "touchscreen voting" and "electronic voting" interchangeably.) The bill has been amended since it went into committee and not in good ways: For one, it put off the time before its provisions have to be fully implemented until 2012. On another, more serious, concern,

it maintains that voting software is a “trade secret” and therefore not subject to public disclosure, a nuance that has turned some voting rights groups against the bill.

The inability to examine the software except in tightly-controlled situations overseen by the manufacturers has been one of the real sticking points for those concerned with the security of the machines, a concern that is by no means without merit, as this video shows:



Despite these worries, VerifiedVoting.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) both say they still support Holt's bill as a step forward with the intent to go for more later. That is not a position uniformly accepted; indeed one site has charged that Holt's bill is actually a complex scheme for a pork-barrel project for a company in his district. However, despite my real misgivings about the "trade secret" provision, I'm going to throw my lot with VerifiedVoting and the EFF and say I hope for passage on the same basis they do.

Even though it has 216 co-sponsors, the bill faces an uncertain future, having

been hit by a barrage of criticism from state and local election officials and election machine makers who contend the timelines are unrealistic, the audit process is overly cumbersome, the reliance on paper is too restrictive and the money allotted to replace existing systems, $1 billion, is insufficient. ...

R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center of the National Association of Election Officials, said the bill was so objectionable that, if passed, he would recommend that state and local election officials refuse to run future federal elections.

State officials also griped that they were supposedly left out of the process.

These are the same sort of state officials, let's not forget, who took the money allocated by 2002's Help America Vote Act (which Holt's bill would amend) and rushed into the arms of the manufacturers of electronic voting machines who dazzled them with hi-tech visions of a no-hassle future - in the course of which those manufacturers won so many concessions related to machine security, maintenance, and auditing that the states had essentially privatized their election processes, failing to obtain and in some cases outright ignoring expert advice about the devices' reliability and safety from hacking.

Why they'd do that is easy to understand, since every time they do have experts check them out, they get results like this:

The problems we found in the code were far more pervasive, and much more easily exploitable, than I had ever imagined they would be.

Now, with the doubts rising right along with the number of head-scratching election results in precincts using the suckers, it appears those same states are more concerned with not admitting they fucked up and were taken for a ride than in protecting the integrity of their voting processes.

As a result,

[a]fter Rules Committee members from both parties expressed concerns about the measure Wednesday, the bill’s fate appeared in jeopardy.

The committee opted to reconvene Thursday rather than approve a rule for considering the bill Wednesday evening, raising the possibility that the bill could be delayed until Friday or pulled altogether.

Now, we hear, it won't come up before Monday amid the concerns of House Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who said she's "scared" that "we're waltzing off a cliff here" while trotting out the classic kill-with-kindness routine,

citing a need for more comprehensive election reform.

Which in English translates to putting your arm around someone and saying "I'm really on your side, really I am" as you stick the knife in their back: "More comprehensive reform" is Washington-speak for "we'll do it later, maybe."

So even with literally half the House as co-sponsors not only may Holt's bill fail, it might not even come to a vote, killed by a handful of people, particularly on the Rules Committee.

Oh, and even if it does pass the House, it may not get anywhere in the Senate, again because of the Rules Committee: Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has warned that moving too quickly might be “an invitation to chaos” and has introduced her own bill

that has a more flexible timeline and sets rules for software inspection more acceptable to the industry.

More acceptable to the industry than making the software a trade secret? Those must be some rules. I'm really impressed with Feinstein's commitment to the integrity of the democratic process, as making things acceptable to the manufacturers of voting machines is apparently more important to her than making them acceptable to people who want their votes secured and counted fairly, accurately, and completely.

Even so, even so, I want the House to pass the damn bill. I want Dianne Feinstein to have to make the choice to bottle up the bill. I want her to have to be in the position of explaining why the voting public of her state and of the nation have to accept at best a weaker, looser bill that leaves the current scandalous system in place for who knows how much longer in order to serve the interests of a handful of corporations. I want to see that.

Footnote: Holt's bill and other attempts to limit electronic voting have been criticized by groups representing disabled voters on the grounds that e-voting gives them the ability to cast a vote unassisted. However, there is nothing in Holt's bill that would inhibit the use of touchscreen voting; rather, it requires the existence of a verifiable paper trail. And even if the machines were banned outright, that ban still could be modified to allow localities to have a few such machines set aside for disabled voters to use. I frankly think the objection is without merit.

Another Footnote: Via This Modern World comes this bit from Wired for mid-August:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself.

Maybe their corporate computer was hacked.

A Third Footnote: Something I want to know is, if a handful of House leaders can with such apparent ease shut down a bill which, again quite literally, half the House has co-sponsored, why the hell can't they do it to Bush's blood money for Iraq?

Some questions, the saying goes, answer themselves.

Speaking of that....

This is rather old news now, referring to an event in May, but I just heard of it the other day via Digby and it seemed a good punctuation mark to the previous post because, well, it just seemed so damned '60s, absolutely wonderful guerrilla theater. This is from Asheville (TN) Indymedia:

Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally [in Knoxville, Tennessee] to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes.

Unfortunately for them the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Part of a group of over 100 counter-protesters, who outnumbered the Nazis, the clowns kept "trying" to "understand" what the bigots were chanting. In response to the cries of "White Power!” the clowns variously declared

- “White Flour?” while running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelled “White Flour”.

- “White flowers?” accompanied by throwing white flowers in the air.

- “Tight Shower?” as they held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under.

- “Wife Power?” with letters spelling it out as the female clowns lifted the male clowns and carried them around.

The comments on the posting include the usual suspects, not only the congratulatory ones but the bigots spewing their bilge about the "white race" being threatened by black crime and accusing those who praised the counter-protesters of (gasp!) "political correctness," a phrase which has become a self-parody.

And - I'm tempted to say of course - there was also someone who insisted that the act of counter-protesting was a violation of the Nazis free speech. Lord, am I sick of that dreck. If the Nazis had actually been prevented from having their hatefest, if the counter-protesters had actually interfered with their ability to speak, he would have had an argument. But he didn't because they didn't; rather, they held the Nazis and their racism up to effective public mockery. Contrary to that commenter, contrary to what we too often hear, such counter-protests are not only valid, they are called for: In the face of bigotry, of racism, of hatred, silence is not an option!

First Footnote: Perhaps my favorite part of the story, though, is not even about the clowns. After the Nazi rally ended, the counter-protesters started to march to the center of Knoxville. The police stopped them - to ask if they wanted an escort, which was provided.

Second Footnote: At a subsequent rally in Knoxville by the same group on June 16, writes one participant in comments to the post,

we switched tactics because we knew they would come prepared for clowns (they were). Instead we brought a kickin sound system and played MLK speeches, Stevie Wonder, black soul ballads and open miked - its drove them insane. In fact you can listen to their recordings of their rally and here MLK clearly in the back ground as they tried to get their hate on.

(There is no direct link to the comment, so to check it, you'll have to go to the story link and scroll down to the comment titled "I wrote this.")

Third Footnote: In another bit of what could easily be called guerrilla theater, the folks on the March for Peace, who I've mentioned a couple of times - I understand there are six now, grown from the original two who stepped off in California - have sent an open letter to George Bush noting the hospitality they've received from people along the route and asking him to put them up in the White House when they get to DC.

All that we ask for is a chance to share our experiences and enter into a dialogue. We are good guests. No one will bother the historic items, make too much noise late at night, or leave the toilet seat up. If you already have guests, we will be more than happy to camp out on the White House lawn.

Sounds like something a slightly-less outrageous Abbie Hoffman would have done. By the way, photos of the walk can be found at this link.

Important footnote to the preceding three posts

Even though it marks my official, stamped and sealed departure from the ranks of "those who know what the hell is going on" because it's been around for a few years and I didn't know about it, I'm still grateful to Tim at Green Left Infoasis for bringing this to my attention.

The Not In Our Name Pledge of Resistance was created collectively by artists and activists in April 2002 as a means of inspiring protest and resistance. It is at the heart of the Not In Our Name Project.

The Pledge was not intended to be signed, rather, it is a tool to be used by individuals, organizations and communities to inspire and strengthen individual and group resistance.

I had heard of Not In Our Name in connection with its support of the teenagers who are walking across the US to protest the war. (They are now in Bridgeport, West Virginia and will be in DC on September 10.) But for some reason I was unaware of the Pledge.

We believe that as people living in the United States it is our responsibility to resist the injustices done by our government, in our names.

Not in our name will you wage endless war - there can be no more deaths - no more transfusions of blood for oil.

Not in our name will you invade countries, bomb civilians, kill more children, letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless.

Not in our name will you erode the very freedoms you have claimed to fight for.

Not by our hands will we supply weapons and funding for the annihilation of families on foreign soil.

Not by our mouths will we let fear silence us.

Not by our hearts will we allow whole peoples or countries to be deemed evil.

Not by our will and Not in our name.

We pledge resistance.

We pledge alliance with those who have come under attack for voicing opposition to the war or for their religion or ethnicity.

We pledge to make common cause with the people of the world to bring about justice, freedom and peace.

Another world is possible and we pledge to make it real.

The reason I was so glad to be made aware of this was that it proved the living existence of the spirit of resistance, that the dreams are not dead, nor do they sleep, they simply exist outside the psychological reach of the Beltway, that web of "analysis" and "critique," that narrowness of mind, of outlook, of hope that ensnares so many of us and yes I include myself in that number. We tend to forget - some, to dismiss or ignore but for me it is genuinely to forget - that there is a great deal going on out there, that there have been wins as well as losses, and even that yes, things actually have been worse in years past.

It was also encouraging because it reminded me of an earlier pledge, 40 years ago it was, in 1967. It was titled "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and its purpose was to mobilize opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft, both still going full blast at the time. Over 20,000 people signed it, thereby committing a misdemeanor because it encouraged and endorsed illegal acts such as draft resistance. (Not an idle concern, as it developed: Signing the Pledge was used as state's evidence in conspiracy trials of antiwar activists.)

Two years later, in September 1969 with the antiwar movement on the rise and the first Moratorium Day coming the next month, it was followed by "A New Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," which took a more radical stance, embracing all the original call said and going beyond it in ways that foreshadow what we see today:

The Vietnam War has reminded us that major decisions can be made in the United States in cynical disregard of the clearly expressed will of the people and with little concern for those most affected, at home and abroad. ... Closely linked to the government, providing its top personnel and shaping its policies, are the centers of private power, the great corporations that control the economic life of the nation and, increasingly of the world. ... But it is not enough to decry the exercise of illegitimate authority; if it is illegitimate, it must be resisted.

The statement laid out five major areas and consider how much could with some minor re-phrasing be said today:

1. The war on Vietnam is neither a unique folly nor an error in judgment. ... Motivated by a mixture of private interests and misplaced convictions, the Pax Americana continues to inflict suffering and subservience on much of the third world.

2. The Vietnam War has also brought the human and economic costs of the garrison state at home. It has allowed an insatiable military organization to claim over half of the federal budget, directly and indirectly. (A tenth is allocated to health, education, and welfare.) ... In brief, the violence of the state has come increasingly to threaten or control the lives of U.S. citizens.

3. This triumph of illegitimate force has continued to enrich the rich. ... The non-unionized and the unemployed are, obviously, the worst victims. Welfare programs, ill-conceived to begin with, have been cut back or left languishing, more an insult than an aid. ...

4. Like wealth, control over institutions has been unequally distributed and irresponsibly used. ... In short, most people have little control over the conditions of their work, their education, their protection, their means of transport - indeed, the air they breathe and the water they drink.

5. The most powerless have been people of color. U.S. history has included the systematic conquest and slaughter of American Indians, the enslavement, degradation, and murder of Afro-Americans, the callous exploitation of Chicanos, the detention and robbery of Japanese-Americans, and the use of atomic weapons, napalm gas, and crop-destroying chemicals against people of the third world. ... People of color die at a disproportionate rate in warfare or "peace." They are unemployed disproportionately, receive inferior education disproportionately, are humiliated disproportionately. ...

Two years ago, the first Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority focused on the war and the draft. But we cannot oppose the war without opposing the institutions that support and maintain it. Imperialism, militarism, economic exploitation, undemocratic power, racism: though the words may seem stale, they describe the exercise of illegitimate authority in the United States today. Again, we call upon all to join us in the struggle against illegitimate authority. Now is the time to resist.

I don't present this as an exercise in aging-hippie nostalgia or as a council of despair drawn from the fact that, as I said, much of the same could be said today. I present it rather as an illustration of the fact that we have faced seemingly overwhelming obstacles before, that we have felt overwhelmed by the forces opposing us before - and that despite it all we have made progress, even if incremental, before.

We did stop the draft and the war, finally. The air and water are cleaner than they were 38 or 40 years ago. (The first Earth Day, which truly was a counter-culture celebration and political protest rather than the corporate-sponsored pick-up-some-litter occasion it's become, hadn't even happened yet.) Little progress has been made on the poverty rate, which has gone up and down - but at least it has been kept below the 1967 rate for 31 of the ensuing 39 years (and the 1967 rate was dramatically below where it had been just a few years before). Among blacks, the 2006 rate is jaw-droppingly high - but it was nearly double that in 1967.

Recall, too, that some of the threats we face today, such as the undermining of the (admittedly-limited) protections under FISA, we face only because of the successes of earlier activists in getting those bills passed and those protections instituted in the first place.

And one last thing: Notice that the New Call doesn't even mention gender discrimination, doesn't even mention homophobia. Progress can happen. Progress has happened.

The existence and circulation of such as the Pledge of Resistance and the spirit it embodies show that such progress is still happening. Yes, it may again be incremental - but it is still progress. Resistance to the machinery of death, celebrations of the dream, are alive and well, along with a growing effort to link various local campaigns as one larger movement, one that can rival and by all that's right and just will surpass that of the '60s, which, I wrote some years ago

over a several-year span was powerful enough to end the draft, limit and finally stop a war, force one (and maybe two) Presidents from office, shake the foundations of a society’s judgements about half its population, force the nuclear power industry to a virtual halt, and change - perhaps not by much but quite possibly permanently - that society’s sense of its relationship to the environment.

And that made me feel so much more encouraged. And I wanted to say that.

Footnote: In searching for the text of the Calls, I discovered a book called My Hippie Grandmother, which begins

I have a hippie grandmother.
I'm really glad she's mine.
She hasn't cut her hair at all
Since nineteen sixty-nine.

It's apparently intended for grades 1-3 but damn if I'm not tempted to buy one for myself.

Here's another rib-tickler

Stupid is as stupid does, so the movie said. And this certainly qualifies. The only question is if the stupidity was because they didn't know what they were doing - or because they did. Once again, the source is the BBC:

The US military has admitted to what it called a "regrettable incident" after it arrested a group of eight Iranians in Baghdad.

The Iranians were held at a checkpoint and detained overnight. They were freed after the Iraqi government intervened. ...

The Iranians were detained after they had been stopped in the company of seven Iraqis carrying unauthorised weapons on Tuesday night, the US military said.

One rifle and two pistols were confiscated. (From among fifteen men? In Iraq, they were practically unarmed.) The US searched the Iranians' rooms, "seizing a computer, mobile phones and a briefcase full of money." They were then handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken for questioning.

It later emerged that the men were energy experts and were in the Iraqi capital to help rebuild the local electricity system. Two of them were found to have diplomatic credentials.

Yeah, oopsie.

The military insisted that this had nothing to do with Shrub's get-tough-with-Iran speech the day before. Whether or not that statement is true - and I expect that even if it is, the Iranians can be excused for doubting it - only determines which kind of stupidity was operating here.

And the laughs keep coming

Updated As I mentioned just the other day, increasingly, the chant in Congress - especially from among the "We are SO antiwar but wattaya gonna do?" Democrats - is to blame the insanity of Iraq on the Iraqi government because of course our fine soldiers are doing a heckuva job so it can't have anything to do with us.

The main target of the criticism has been Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the one-time freely-elected golden boy of Iraq's race to freedom and now the golden idol who has been falsely worshipped and needs to be brought crashing down. Intriguingly, this comes at a time when former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has been making himself very visible and being embraced by people determined to forget that past that he represents. Not forgive, mind you, forget. Completely.

Allawi, after all, was not only regarded as a thug with "blood on his hands" from his days as a Baath Party operative in London in the 1970s, he was accused by two independent witnesses of having

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

in June 2004. That account was confirmed in a later article by another source.

Which, actually, gives me pause: Maybe these people bolstering Allawi haven't forgotten. Maybe they remember all too well, since some, we hear, are of the opinion that what Iraq needs is a "new strongman." Some such voices are old, and some are new, as CNN reported just over a week ago.

[E]xasperated front-line U.S. generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives [in Iraq]....

"Democratic institutions are not necessarily the way ahead in the long-term future," said Brig. Gen. John "Mick" Bednarek, part of Task Force Lightning in Diyala province, one of the war's major battlegrounds. ...

"I would describe it as leaving an effective government behind that can provide services to its people, and security. It needs to be an effective and functioning government that is really a partner with the United States and the rest of the world in this fight against the terrorists," said [Maj. Gen. Benjamin] Mixon, [commander of Task Force Lightning,] who will not be perturbed if such goals are reached without democracy.

"Well, see that all over the Middle East," he said, stating that democracy is merely an option, that Iraqis are free to choose or reject. ...

[S]ome senior U.S. military commanders even suggest privately the entire Iraqi government must be removed by "constitutional or non-constitutional" means and replaced with a stable, secure, but not necessarily democratic entity.

Yep, democracy is "merely an option." I'm sure the soldiers and their families, especially the families of those who have died, will understand that the "freedom for Iraq" they supposedly have been killing and dying for is "merely an option" and what's important is having a government that is "functioning" and can provide "security." I'm sure none of them will ask "But didn't they have that before?"

Merely an option. That's why, I suppose, serious commentator David Ignatius could write approvingly in Thursday's Washington Post of Ayad Allawi's contention about an earlier "turning point" in the war. Ignatius writes that

[t]he CIA warned in the summer and fall of 2004 that the Iranians were pumping money into Iraq to steer the Jan. 30, 2005, elections toward the coalition of Shiite religious parties ... [consisting of] candidates who would be friendly to Iran, under the banner of Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The CIA reported that in the run-up to the election, as many as 5,000 Iranians a week were crossing the border with counterfeit ration cards to register to vote in Iraq's southern provinces.

A program was approved to "counter this Iranian tide," but was then canceled, Allawi said, "under the pretext that the U.S. does not want to interfere," thus leading to the Shia-dominated government and the loss of all things good and pure. Put bluntly, the problem was that the US failure to interfere enough in the 2005 elections.

Atrios was unkind enough to demonstrate how this is another example of the level of serious discourse about the war, pulling up an Ignatius column from April 26, 2006, in which he quotes the "wily" Zalmay Khalilzad, then ambassador to Iraq, as praising al-Maliki as "someone who is independent of Iran."

In fact, Khalilzad said, according to Ignatius, that Iran "pressured everyone for [interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-]Jafari to stay."

One senior Iraqi official said the gist of Iran's letters was "stick with him, or else,"

Ignatius wrote, calling al-Maliki's elevation "something of a victory for Khalilzad." Not only that, he credited al-Sistani, the man he now suggests acted as a cover for Iranian influence, with delivering "the decisive blow" in getting the Iranian-backed Jafari out.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said

[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

That's true enough, as foolish consistency often is mere pig-headedness. However, the corollary to that is that inconsistency such as that shown by David Ignatius is just foolishness.

Updated with a Footnote: Via Liberal Oasis (which I admit I rarely read anymore because I got tired of endless postings about proper Democratic Party campaign tactics) I learned that the US did not "decline to interfere" in the 2005 elections: As reported by Seymour Hersh in July 2005, it merely dropped one plan in favor of another, one promoting Allawi and run "off the books" by retired CIA officers. The may be some disagreement about how successful that interference was, but its very existence makes Allawi even more of a liar and Ignatius even more of a fool and a tool.

Iraq my brains...

Updated ...for a better pun, but I have to settle for that.

Why bother looking for a joke at all? Because the whole situation has turned into one. A bitter, sad joke on almost everyone involved: Iraqis, Americans, everyone except a narrow clique of self-important jackasses both here and there interested only in their own political positions and economic power.

Start with this from the BBC for Wednesday:

Latest figures from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, show the number of Iraqis fleeing their homes is rising.

The latest figure is 60,000 per month, compared to a previous level of 50,000, a UNHCR spokeswoman said.

The body estimates 4.2m Iraqis have been displaced since the 2003 invasion. ...

UNHCR spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis said many Iraqis were struggling to get the basic necessities for daily life.

"Iraqis are finding it harder to get access to social services inside Iraq and many Iraqis are choosing to leave ethnically mixed areas before they are forced to do so," she said. ...

The UNHCR has registered more than 170,000 refugees in the countries neighbouring Iraq

but Syria and Jordan now estimate that between them they contain over 2.1 million Iraqi refugees. UNHCR and UNICEF are appealing for $130 million in funding to provide for educational programs for Iraqi children living in the two nations.

Meanwhile, the sectarian violence we are repeatedly assured is declining seems to be in healthy condition, as

[f]ierce gun battles have cut short a major religious festival in Iraq, which had drawn hundreds of thousands of Shia pilgrims to the holy city of Karbala[, BBC reported on Tuesday].

The clashes have left more than 50 dead and 200 injured, police said. Troop reinforcements have been brought in and worshippers ordered to leave the city. ...

Troops were rushed to Karbala after the eruption of fierce fighting close to two of the most important shrines in Shia Islam, and celebrations that had brought pilgrims to the city from across Iraq and further afield turned to chaos, confusion and bloodshed.

Gunmen with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons forced their way past checkpoints and appeared to be trying to take control of the area around the shrines.

As security forces fought back, several hotels were set ablaze. ...

Various sources blamed the attack on the Mehdi army militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr. In Karbala, the police are linked to their political rivals, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC).

The violence was bad enough that even as he denied any part in it, Sadr announced on Wednesday that he was freezing the activities of his Mehdi Army for up to six months, the Beeb said. The militia has been splitting into factions recently and it may well be that he's realized it's slipping out of his control and wants to impose some order before it goes too far.

In Najaf, another spokesman said the order included "suspending the taking up of arms against occupiers, as well as others"

but the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that

Sadr's official spokesman in Najaf, Sheik Ahmed Shibani, said the stand-down did not mean "stopping resistance against the occupation."

However, since there clearly are ways to resist the occupation without taking up arms - protest, strikes, boycotts, political action, the list goes on - those two statements are not contradictory. The Times also noted that in the wake of Sadr's pronouncement, Baghdad "was noticeably calm" and that

[t]he number of corpses found around the capital Thursday - five - was also about half the usual daily number of victims of sectarian death squads.

It shows just how bad it is that a statement like that - five victims of sectarian violence today - is good news.

It's so clear that it's bad that even official reports - or at least those not written by the White House - can't pretend anything to the contrary. For one, the New York Times said on Friday that

[a]n independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.

It's unlikely that's possible either politically or even physically, but the fact the recommendation would even be made shows just how rampant the corruption and divisions are. (Note back to the above bit about the violence in Karbala, where it's suspected the fighting happened because the police force is linked to a particular political faction that is a rival of Sadr.)

For another, and the more-noted one, the Washington Post said on Thursday that a draft of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) declares that

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress.... The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration. ...

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

The draft says that the average number of daily attacks against civilians was 25 in February and 26 in July, that is, no change worthy of the word.

The 18 benchmarks were part of legislation passed in May. In an interim report in July, the WHS* said that "satisfactory progress" was being made on eight, two were mixed, and even they had to admit the other eight were losers. The GAO report is even tougher: Judging on a pass/fail basis, it says that only one of eight political benchmarks has been achieved and only two of ten security ones.

Despite its strict mandate, the GAO draft concludes that two benchmarks - the formation of governmental regions and the allocation and expenditure of $10 billion for reconstruction - have been "partially met."

So count those as worth a half-point and you get a final score of 4-14. Counted another way, it's 4 for 18 for a batting average of .222, which will likely get you sent down to the minors real quick.

Significantly, the WaPo says in a different article that

[a]lthough the State Department proposed some changes, it did not dispute the basic conclusions, said an administration official involved in Iraq policy.

Another significant point to note is that

[t]he person who provided the draft report to The Post said it was being conveyed from a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version - as some officials have said happened with security judgments in this month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

That is, get this out before the White House fucks with it. In the event there are more than minor changes, it would be interesting to see the administration pressed on just why the alterations were made and refusing to be satisfied with the bland "as the result of agency review" but instead insisting "yes, of course it was as the result of 'review' but who did those reviews? What did they say? Why were they persuasive?" Also, I've read enough GAO reports to know that the staff will often cite agency comments and then state why they disagree (if indeed they do). If there are changes and no such dissent, if I was in Congress I'd damn well want to know why.

But then again... Congress is where the bitter joke comes in. The Washington Post for Wednesday:

President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said yesterday, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces.

The request - which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq[, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker]. ...

The request is being prepared now in the belief that Congress will be unlikely to balk so soon after hearing the two officials argue that there are promising developments in Iraq but that they need more time to solidify the progress they have made, a congressional aide said.

They are going to hit Congress up for another $200 billion - on top of the $330 billion they've already wasted - to slaughter Iraqis, to undermine security there (and here), to encourage terrorism, to support the corruption that underlies and advances sectarian murders and ethnic cleansing, to continue this crime against history; $200 billion to continue to take an active role in the destruction of a country and its descent into chaos that, if European history is any guide, can last for decades and spread across the region before burning itself out into mere bigotry. And they expect to get it.

Not only do they expect to get it, they are already saying that nothing, nothing at all, will change.

Despite widespread media anticipation of next month's Iraq hearings, Pentagon insiders say they do not expect them to result in any major changes in military strategy.

How much more pathetic can you get? How sorry does a spectacle have to be before it passes beyond anger, sinks below disgust, drops through the bottom of despair, and sits in the muck of sheer inanity, just a bitter, bitter joke?

Oh, the Dummycrats talked tough, they were just oh my so outraged. Why, a representative of Harry Reid's office said "we'll give it the scrutiny it deserves" and that it was "long past time for giving blank checks to the administration." Nancy Pelosi griped about "failed policies" and declared grandly that Americans want "a new direction" instead of "another quarterly invoice." Robert Byrd also warned against "blank checks."

But of course we have been here before. Several times. Is there anyone here who thinks it really will be different this time? I don't and here's why, again via the Washington Post:

Saying the coming weeks will be "one of the last opportunities" to alter the course of the war, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he is now willing to compromise with Republicans to find ways to limit troop deployments in Iraq.

Reid acknowledged that his previous firm demand for a spring withdrawal deadline had become an obstacle for a small but growing number of Republicans who have said they want to end the war but have been unwilling to set a timeline.

"I don't think we have to think that our way is the only way," Reid said of specific dates during an interview in his office here. "I'm not saying, 'Republicans, do what we want to do.' Just give me something that you think you would like to do, that accomplishes some or all of what I want to do."

Please, GOPpers, please, throw me a bone here. Something, anything. Just say you want to end the war someday. No timetables, no deadlines, no schedules, none of that. I swear. Really. I won't make a fuss and if you can just, you know, throw me a kiss or something, that nice Mr. President can have all the money he wants. Just watch. Pleeeze?

Reid was quoted in that article as saying he was embarrassed it had taken him as long as it did to come around "but now I'm here." Well, goddam it, Harry, if you really are here, fucking act like it! You are the goddam Senate Majority Leader. You fucking run the place. You want to stop "blank checks?" Don't sign any! You say you can't override vetoes? Don't pass an appropriation! Bush can't veto a bill if there's no bill.

Too much for you, too bold, too afraid of being accused of "abandoning the troops" by forcing them to come home (like that accusation ever made sense)? Screw the GOPpers who are even wimpier in the face of Bush's asshole stubbornness than you are. Pass a bill with real limits, real deadlines - and when Bush vetoes it, pass the same damn bill again! Tell him flat out and publicly and repeatedly that this is the deal! If he wants his blood money, it comes with these conditions. And if he doesn't like it, he doesn't get the cash. Period!

Is there some political risk in that? Yes, there is, especially among a crew as inept at PR as you lot seem to be. You have to decide which is more important: your career of the scores of billions of dollars and the thousands of lives you can save. Bluntly, I think we all already know which is your choice.

Prove me wrong.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Updated to include the State Department acceptance of the basic contentions of the GAO report. (With a tip o' the hat to Greg Sargent at The Horse's Mouth at Talking Points Memo.)

Adventures in letter-writing

On August 24, the Toronto Star (Canada) published an article griping that NAFTA

has become a convenient target for those seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination who are following a campaign rite of demonizing trade deals to appease the party's labour base before moving to the centre during the general election.

It quoted some of those Democratic criticisms and then turned to one Elliot Feldman for a comment. The article seemed clearly biased to me, so I did a simply search on "Elliot Feldman" and immediately came up with a result that prompted me to write to The Star. My letter was published on August 27. Now, what makes this worthy of note is how the letter was edited. What follows is the letter as I sent it. The italicized parts are what the editors at The Star removed prior to publication, the words in brackets are ones they added. The individual words changed are irrelevant - notice the whole sentences.

So Elliot Feldman wants to "inject a bit of reality" into the NAFTA debate ("Democratic presidential contenders trash NAFTA," August 24)? We could have used instead a little reality from The Star.

You[r article] quote[s] various Democrats criticizing NAFTA, but the only person quoted [who's] looking at those statements is Mr. Feldman, who you describe only as "a Washington-based trade expert." But in fact, his own bio says he is a former Director of the Canadian-American Business Council, which is a corporate lobbying group, and "a frequent legal adviser to the Government of Canada in WTO cases."

So when Mr. Feldman goes on about Democrats' "base instincts" and George [W.] Bush's supposed "protectionism" and rails against the softwood lumber agreement, he's not injecting "reality," he's injecting the views of business associates and clients. For you to describe and present him as if he was some neutral party was misleading and unprofessional.

I expected better from you.

So what was intended as a criticism of the paper as biased was turned into a criticism of Feldman as biased by selective editing. The only defense for that would be that the paper never made any attempt to learn anything of Feldman's background before quoting him - and I really don't see how that's an improvement. Maybe I shouldn't have expected better after all.

A philosophical aside

This has nothing to do with anything else, it's a purely philosophical musing, but it was prompted by the story about Dr. Pou so it seemed reasonable to include it here.

First, you should know that her jeopardy is not over: She still faces civil lawsuits brought by relatives of patients who died. She says she did administer morphine and a sedative but insists that she did not intend any harm; it was palliative.

Okay, read the interview, consider the situation, consider the condition of the patients. Then consider this:

There was an episode of ST:TOS called "The Conscience of the King." A man known to history as Kodos the Executioner, who executed (painlessly, but still executed) 4000 residents of a starving planet to save the rest, is now hiding from his past as Karidian, the leader of a traveling Shakespearean acting troupe. Kirk is suspicious of him and presses him on his possible connection to Kodos.

At one point, Karidian asks Kirk "What would history have said about Kodos if the relief ship had not arrived months ahead of schedule?" Kirk says it doesn't matter because history has made its judgment, but the question about desperate actions in desperate circumstances does linger.

Just suppose for the sake of the thought, just suppose, that Dr. Pou did commit mercy killings of very sick, suffering patients who had little hope of surviving long enough to be evacuated. Does our judgment about her moral guilt (we're not talking legal guilt here) vary with whether or not it ultimately turned out they could have been evacuated in time? Why or why not?