June 2008 Archives

Here's another reminder that, despite the oft-repeated talking point, our nation has indeed been attacked since 9/11.

The Washington Post reports that the United States Department of Justice has agreed to pay $5.85 million to Dr. Steven Hatfill as a settlement to the lawsuit he filed after former Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a person on interest in the anthrax attacks that began on September 18, 2001.

The government admits no wrongdoing in the settlement. But, I have to agree with the following observation:

"I don't think anyone would believe the Department of Justice would . . . pay that kind of money unless they felt there was significant exposure at trial," said Brian A. Sun, a defense lawyer who represented nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee in a leak case.

While far too many reporters and Republicans reading their talking points today often suggest that we have not been attacked since 9/11, the Washington Post story reminds us just how seriously all of us took the anthrax attacks at the time.

The October 2001 anthrax mailings, sent to then-Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), network television offices in New York and the company that owns National Enquirer, gripped the nation and disrupted correspondence. In addition to the two D.C. postal workers, a Florida photographer, a New York hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman died after being exposed to the powder.

Just as we have not captured Osama bin Laden, just has we have not finished the job in Afghanistan, just as terrorist attacks have risen dramatically around the world -- the Bush Administration has failed to solve these anthrax attacks.

And people wonder why I am not impressed by the Bush Administration's record on such issues.

James Fallows has written a must-read post summarizing his thinking about the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

While he worries about air quality and major infrastructure projects that are not yet completed, he points to other issues we should all consider:

Rather I’m puzzled by a series of deliberate and inadvertent decisions that, if you didn’t know better, you might think were designed to turn the whole spectacle into a source of friction rather than pride for China. None of these steps is news on its own. Collectively the pattern is discouraging, and puzzling too.

Fallows is correct. If the Chinese government wants a successful Olympics (and Fallows argues it is in the world's interest that these games come off well), then how does one explain the visa restrictions, crackdown against foreign journalists, among other issues?

This is another important way to look at the upcoming Olympics. You may wish that politics and other events would not intrude into our sports, but they do -- and we need to keep that fact in mind.

An e-mail from JG pointed me towards a fascinating Washington Post story about a scholar who has been trying to find the person who started one of the e-mail accusations against Senator Obama. Matthew Mosk writes about Dr. Danielle Allen's efforts to overcome the difficulties presented by the internet in her efforts to figure out the mystery.

Think Progress catches Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal denying there were any oil spills caused by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

Given the oil spills could be seen from space, this is quite a lie talking point.

Is Governor Jindal clueless, a liar, or just sucking up to be John McCain's vice presidential nominee? Regardless, I hope the American people will be smart enough not to fall for this talking point.

The Independent's Steve Connor reports about how polar scientists are concerned there will be no ice at the north pole this summer for the first time in recorded human history.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Jon Perr debunks the radical conservative talking point alleging that 30 former Guantanamo detainees had gone back to fight against the United States. This lie allegation has been promoted by Justice Antonin Scalia, Senator John McCain, and John "Torture Memo" Yoo, among others. As Perr writes:

That figure of 30 terror recidivists unleashing a bloodbath had been debunked by earlier studies from Denbeaux’s team and recent investigations from the McClatchy papers. But Denbeaux’s updated analysis, including the revelations that the Defense Department itself backtracked from the infamous Gitmo 30 in July 2007 and May 2008, shows the extent to which Justice Scalia engaged in cherry-picking dubious data to bolster his blood-curdling Boumediene dissent last week. And it hasn’t stopped the exaggerated number of Gitmo repeat terrorists (like the cry of “worse than Dred Scott“) from becoming a standard Republican talking point since the Court’s restoration of habeas corpus last week.

Really, they have no shame.

Over at The Oil Drum, Jerome a Paris explains why we should be skeptical of the Saudi government's latest promise to increase oil production: all of the previous announcements the Saudis have not kept.

Here we go again. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum quotes ABC's Jake Tapper in a post about the FISA bill debate. Let's look closely at what Tapper says in a FISA interview question to Barack Obama:

TAPPER: There has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And [the Bush administration says] the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs. How do you know that they're wrong? It's not possible that they're right?

There has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11.

Tell that to the five people who died in the anthrax attacks that began on September 18, 2001.

Tapper is not the first person to go with this rewriting of our history. You can see it all the time on the internets.

Why have we as a country erased the anthrax attacks from our collective memory?

Our country has been attacked since September 11, 2001. An the anthrax attacks remain unsolved. Why don't we care about this fact?

Americablog's John Aravosis is right: Dan Koeppel writes a truly interesting commentary in the New York Times about the future of bananas. Among other conclusions, Koeppel warns us that the current variation we eat could be gone in the next 20 years.

I regret I agree with Atrios' prediction about the end result of the Democrats' capitulation on the FISA bill:

As I've written before, Democrats will regret embracing the expansion of executive power because a President Obama will find his administration undone by an "abuse of power" scandal. All of those powers which were necessary to prevent the instant destruction of the country will instantly become impeachable offenses. If you can't imagine how such a pivot can take place then you haven't been paying attention.

Indeed.

Scientists and Engineers for America have joined 18 other organizations in creating a list of seven questions for Congressional candidates about science and technology issues.

Now if only the media would decide to ask them rather than run horserace story after horserace story.

Here's a radical conservative talking point that needs to be corrected. Despite what our conservative friends say, Hurricanes Rita and Katrina did cause massive oil spills -- a total that approaches the Exxon Valdez disaster. Think Progress's Wonk Room has the details.

I do not think we should underestimate how important it is for Congress next year to take all necessary steps to ensure the next person as deluded as Vice President Dick Cheney understands that the Office of the Vice President is a part of the Executive Branch. As The Hill's Kevin Bogardus and Rebecca Brown report:

Vice President Dick Cheney has won his battle to withhold records from the public despite efforts by Congress and other critics who say they should be open to scrutiny.

The Democrats are conceding defeat. The party’s top investigator in the House of Representatives acknowledges that there is nothing more he can do to force the vice president’s hand.

We largely ignored voting reform after the 2000 and 2004 elections. We must not ignore the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses of power after they leave office next January. Constitutional balance of powers among our branches of government must be restored.

Liz Sidoti's love note to Senator John McCain hatchet job against Senator Barack Obama yesterday does indeed provide another reason to boycott the Associated Press.

Because, in Sidoti's world, Senator Obama's decision to opt out of public campaign financing is worse -- far worse -- than Senator McCain's illegal campaign fundraising in violation of the spending caps he accepted for the primaries. Firedoglake's Attaturk explains the gory details.

Yes. More responses like this, please.

“Democrats are not going to be lectured to on security by the mayor who failed to learn the lessons of the 1993 attacks, refused to prepare his own city’s first responders for the next attack, urged President Bush to put his corrupt crony in charge of our homeland security, and was too busy lobbying for his foreign clients to join the Iraq Study Group,” DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said. “Rudy Giuliani, can echo the McCain campaign’s false and misleading attacks, but he can’t change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of President Bush’s flawed and failed policies on everything from energy security and the economy to the war in Iraq.”

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson made a complete fool of himself this morning, claiming that Al Franken is "actively push[ing] our culture toward vulgarity and viciousness."

Oh really now. The man who was George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, and who helped bring the world Dick Cheney, torture, extraordinary rendition, and the Iraq War (among other atrocities) is now lecturing others about vulgarity and viciousness in politics? This man dares to actively state a concern for "the cooperation and mutual respect necessary in a functioning democracy" after what he has helped to happen over the past seven years?

The Washington Post should be embarrassed to employ such a shallow and hypocritical thinker for its op-ed page.

Atrios does an excellent job, here and here, showing the incredible differences between what Mr. Gerson thinks is vulgar (Al Franken) and not vulgar (lots of dead civilians in Iraq, to take one example).

To say that Mr. Gerson's definitions are completely backward is an understatement.

Via Dean Baker, we see this New York Times report that concludes banks have written down nearly half of the profits they claimed during the housing bubble years. As Louise Story writes:

The numbers are staggering. Between early 2004 and mid-2007, a period of unprecedented wealth on Wall Street, seven of the nation’s largest financial companies earned a combined $254 billion in profits.

But since last July, those same banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — have written down the value of the assets they hold by $107.2 billion, gutting their earnings and share prices. Worldwide, the reckoning totals $380 billion, much of which reflects a plunge in the value of tricky mortgage investments.

Those profits, of course, were private. Far too many people are now seeking government bailouts (like the Bear Stearns deal) to subsidize the risk. Meanwhile, as these millionaires and billionaires seek special treatment, the Senate Republicans have decided to obstruct an increase in unemployment benefits for working Americans.

There is a class war going on in this nation. For how long will the radical Republicans be allowed to fight it virtually unopposed?

The Associated Press stupidly has decided to use the DMCA and file a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort for what is clearly fair use of content.

In response, many bloggers have decided to stop linking to AP stories in order to stop giving the AP web traffic. The AP's action is really quite ironic, since the wire service is well known for taking content from its member news organizations, changing it slightly, and then claiming it as its own without crediting the original source.

You can read more about this controversy on Firedoglake, and you can sign a petition against the AP's inexplicable action by clicking here.

Bruce Schneier is rightly unimpressed with the new TSA regulations requiring people to cooperate with TSA screeners and not refuse to provide ID.

That's right; people who refuse to show ID on principle will not be allowed to fly, but people who claim to have lost their ID will. I feel well-protected against terrorists who can't lie.

I don't think any further proof is needed that the ID requirement has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.

Such control, alas, does not make me feel any safer.

It is stories like this one that explain why I hope President Bush and his entire team will be condemned throughout history for tarnishing what once was (and hopefully will be again) the world's shining city on the hill.

As McClatchy Newspaper's Tom Lasseter reports, we have imprisoned innocent people as enemy combatants and subjected them to beatings and other mistreatment while in our custody.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

Of course, when people pointed this out, the radical conservatives in the media and government declared us traitors. Those radicals on the right, however, were so blinded by their ideology to realize that by mistreating innocent people and holding them for years without recourse, we were making our country much less safe.

The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Nice work by the Bush Administration. Nice work.

Oh. My. God. My experiences of the past seven-plus years have not prepared me to process this news:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office has acknowledged that he erred when telling an audience this week that China is drilling off the coast of Cuba.

Citing columnist George Will, Cheney on Wednesday told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that "oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida. We're not doing it. The Chinese are in cooperation with the Cuban government."

Cheney admits an error. Shocking.

That Cheney uses a source like George Will, rather than official government sources, for his "facts" is, alas, less shocking.

Our president has plans. As the Times of London reports:

President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

Such focus is good. After all, it's only been 2,462 days since President Bush vowed to get bin Laden "dead or alive."

Media Matters captures another Hall of Shame moment for the Fox News Channel and E.D. Hill:

Summary: Teasing a segment on the "gesture everyone seems to interpret differently," Fox News' E.D. Hill said: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? ... We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says." In the ensuing discussion with a "body language expert," Hill referred to the "Michelle and Barack Obama fist bump or fist pound," but at no point did she explain her earlier reference to "a terrorist fist jab."

A terrorist fist jab.

That's your Fox News fair and balanced news reading of a celebratory moment. Get ready. They've only just begun.

Rick Pearlstein has written a major post examining the huge impact reaction to the open housing law debate had on the Election of 1966, and particularly, Senator Paul Douglas' loss to Charles Percy in Illinois that year.

As a fellow Bowdoin College alumnus, I have often found myself reading with interest articles about the famed liberal Senator from Illinois. As Pearlstein writes, Douglas' 1966 reelection loss was part of an election that would redefine politics for two generations.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"—archivsts' metric for how big a collection would be if you stacked the papers one atop another. And somehow, somewhere, I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King's presence in Chicago. I quote many of them in a section of NIXONLAND of which I'm most proud, the one with the most original research and historical insights: the one on how "open housing" opened up the conservative backlash that inaugurated the Republican dominance of the politics of our own generation. I've always wanted to do a post printing, for the historical record, all the letters I put down in my research notes.

That's what I'm about to do. They comprise an unmatched emotional history on how the white middle class built by the New Deal learned to vote Republican. And an unmatched marker of how far this nation has come, now that this same city has given us our first African American presidential nominee.

This post is a must-read for anyone interested in peering into the political alignment of the past 40 years. It is also a reminder that I need to get Pearlstein's book, Nixonland, much higher on the stack of books I need to read.

Richard Clarke is correct: the people who lied to us and manipulated intelligence to justify this horrible war with Iraq must be held accountable. At a minimum, they need to admit what they have done. As Clarke suggests:

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

That last paragraph is really important to remember: this time, they have to be held accountable.

Atrios, among others, is right: our pundit class is once again showing how stupid and biased they are by refusing to mention Senator Clinton's vote to authorize force in Iraq as a reason she lost the Democratic nomination race.

Because it wasn't just a reason. In the end, it was the reason. As Atrios writes, "No Iraq, no way to challenge Clinton."

You'd think someone among the talking heads and political analysts might make note of that.

Of course, it is hard when the media is doing all it can to ignore the Iraq War at all right now. Over at Altercation, George Zornick points to an American Journalism Review study that measures the massive drop-off in Iraq War coverage.

* During the first 10 weeks of 2007, Iraq accounted for 23 percent of the newshole for network TV news. In 2008, it plummeted to 3 percent during that period. On cable networks it fell from 24 percent to 1 percent, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

* By [Sacramento Bee public editor Armando] Acuna's count, during the first three months of this year, front-page stories about Iraq in the Bee were down 70 percent from the same time last year. Articles about Iraq once topped the list for reader feedback. By mid-2007, "Their interest just dropped off; it was noticeable to me," says the public editor.

* A daily tracking of 65 newspapers by the Associated Press confirms a dip in page-one play throughout the country. In September 2007, the AP found 457 Iraq-related stories (154 by the AP) on front pages, many related to a progress report delivered to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Over the succeeding months, that number fell to as low as 49. A spike in March 2008 was largely due to a rash of stories keyed to the conflict's fifth anniversary, according to AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Silverman.

* By March 2008, a striking reversal had taken place. Only 28 percent of Americans knew that 4,000 military personnel had been killed in the conflict, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Eight months earlier, 54 percent could cite the correct casualty rate.

* TV news was a vivid indicator of the declining interest. The three broadcast networks' nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004. That leveled off to 2,000 annually. By late 2007, it was half that, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the nightly news.

The war continues. Important decisions are being made. It may not be happy work, but our media really has a responsibility to continue covering a war for which they were far too willing to cheerlead when President Bush was talking tough and landing on aircraft carriers.