Later On

Good list with reviews.

Spencer Ackerman does a Cheney-error round-up with lots of links. Check it out.

Take a look.

Interesting site:

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Good summary by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

— Cheney said that President Barack Obama’s decision to release the four top-secret Bush administration memos on the interrogation techniques was "flatly contrary" to U.S. national security, and would help al Qaida train terrorists in how to resist U.S. interrogations.

However, Blair, who oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, said in his statement that he recommended the release of the memos, "strongly supported" Obama’s decision to prohibit using the controversial methods and that "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."

— Cheney said …

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Paul Krugman:

That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda.

So here’s the question: Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what’s happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation? Or will he honor his own pledge, made back during the campaign, to go on the offensive against special interests if they stand in the way of reform?

The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care, including the American Hospital Association and the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.

The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. “For too long, politics and point-scoring have prevented our country from tackling this growing crisis,” it said, adding, “The American people are eager to put the old Washington ways behind them.”

But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised — that it had made no commitment to the administration’s goal of reducing the rate at which health care costs are rising by 1.5 percentage points a year. And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to “ramp up” savings, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies. And at least some insurers are gearing up for a major smear campaign…

Continue reading. From later in the column:

… “We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system,” says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that’s true, why don’t you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it’s really that bad?

For none of the reform proposals currently on the table would force people into a government-run insurance plan. At most they would offer Americans the choice of buying into such a plan.

And the goal of the insurers is to deny Americans that choice. They fear that many people would prefer a government plan to dealing with private insurance companies that, in the real world as opposed to the world of their ads, are more bureaucratic than any government agency, routinely deny clients their choice of doctor, and often refuse to pay for care…

It’s astonishing that the mainstream media can be so tone-deaf. Greenwald:

Yesterday, President Obama approved a proposed civilian nuclear technology-sharing agreement between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates and requested its execution, but CNN — in one of the all-time most unintentionally hilarious articles ever written — reports that its ratification is in doubt:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama on Thursday sent a civil nuclear agreement with the United Arab Emirates to the Senate for ratification, but its passage remains uncertain, thanks to a recently disclosed video.

Senior U.S. officials said lawmakers critical of the deal could use the video, which shows a member of the UAE government’s royal family torturing a man, to argue the United States should not have such nuclear cooperation with a country where the rule of law is not respected and human rights violations are tolerated.

How anyone could write or even read that last sentence without succumbing to painful, prolonged cackling is genuinely mystifying. 

The videos in questions involve torture by a single individual citizen of the UAE, not an entire government. The individual torturer isn’t even part of the UAE’s government:  he never worked in its Justice Department, doesn’t currently sit as a judge on a high-level court, doesn’t teach law in a prestigious university, doesn’t have his torture-defending speeches broadcast on national television by UAE news networks, isn’t constantly defended by admiring journalists any time he’s criticized, and doesn’t have hordes of TV pundits demanding that nothing be done to him.  Also, the UAE legislature never passed any laws on a bipartisan basis retroactively immunizing him from the consequences of his torture.

And one other thing:  the torturer in question — in the UAE — has been arrested while a criminal investigation takes place.  More here.  Nonetheless, entering into an agreement with a country like that — one that is so tolerant of "human rights violations" and "where the rule of law is not respected" — would degrade our lofty moral standing and betray our steadfast commitment to the rule of law.

Our mainstream media have become pathetic.

We’re all aflutter about the trip. This time next week we’ll be in Tarrytown. The wedding shirt I ordered just arrived, so my ensemble is complete. I mailed ahead a 5-pack of blades, and I will take with me: a D.R. Harris shave stick, the Simpsons Key Hole 3 Best brush, and the Edwin Jagger Ivory Chatsworth razor (with no blade, of course). For the aftershave, I have a 1-oz sample of Booster Mosswood, which will do fine. Wonder whether I should take any spare razors as little prezzies…

Edwin Jagger brush, Edwin Jagger soap bowl, and Edwin Jagger Lined Chatsworth (holding a fairly fresh Swedish Gillette blade). The soap, however, is Himalaya shaving soap from The Soap Opera. A reader tipped me off about this soap in a comment, and I like it a lot. Very nice on the skin, presumably because of the shea butter it contains.

I got a very nice lather, and the blade in the Chatsworth was plenty sharp: three smooth passes to perfection, and then a splash of the Musgo Real. Extremely good shave today.

Very interesting commentary in The Nation by Rick Reyes, a retired corporal in the US Marine Corps, served in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. It begins:

I was on liberty in Australia, dancing at a club I can’t remember sometime around midnight, when it happened. The music shut off and an announcement came on: "America is under attack. Head back to your ships." This was the worst–the impossible. This was September 11, 2001.

Back at my ship, ambulance sirens blared. Hundreds of Marines stood on deck, anxiously awaiting word. Someone said the Pentagon had been attacked. My platoon sergeant stood up and delivered a fiery speech filled with "No one [expletive] with America!" and "We’re going to kick some ass!" Later that night, the same sergeant turned to me asked me if I was ready.

Without giving it a second thought, I replied, "This is what I joined for."

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, as I recalled those words testifying before Senator John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I sat where a young Kerry was once seated as he awoke the nation to the grim realities of war in Vietnam. I explained to the committee that I always desired to serve my country, ensure basic freedoms and fight for justice and the American way. This had been my dream since childhood, a way to honor my Mexican immigrant parents who worked tirelessly to give my family a better life, a way out of an East Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by gang violence. Yet what I witnessed and experienced during a seven-month deployment in Afghanistan followed by another in Iraq has forever shattered this once noble ambition.

As an infantry rifleman in the Marines Corps, I …

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Notice that the latest plot was foiled not by the military or DHS, but by the NYPD and the FBI. Spencer Ackerman:

NYPD and the FBI busted an apparent homegrown terror cell in the stages of plotting to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx. As someone who used to occasionally hang out in Riverdale — the northwest Bronx Jewish neighborhood in question — I have no shortage of four-letter words for these anti-Semites, and congratulations to the law enforcement officials for a job well done. Should the four men be found guilty of anything like what the criminal complaint against them charges, they’ll be justifiably sentenced to a long time in a federal prison, which is magically capable of incarcerating dangerous felons.

The answer is unclear, though the military touts a high recidivism rate—without proof, of course. Given the military’s track record vis-à-vis telling the truth, I think we’re entitled to serious doubts. A trio of stories from the Washington Independent:

Release the GTMO Document, by Spencer Ackerman

As The New York Times reports, the Pentagon is sitting on a document that claims one in seven Guantanamo Bay detainees released by the Bush administration returns* to terrorism. These claims have come up before and been debunked before. But it shouldn’t matter. If there’s a relevant piece of information for the Guantanamo debate, it should be released. If it can withstand scrutiny, it should be part of the debate. If it can’t, oh well. Setting policy based on insufficient information is obviously unwise.

Anyhow, The Times saw the document — it reports that it will probably be released soon anyhow, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman — and it claims a recidivism rate* of 14 percent of detainees. That’s at odds with Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ claim of a “four or five percent” recidivism rate in January, but maybe this represents new data. (Has there been enough data since January to make such an uptick plausible? Hmm.)

This, however, doesn’t inspire confidence: …

Of the Alleged 74 Terror Recidivists, Why are Only Five ‘Verifiable?’, by Daphne Eviatar

To follow up on Spencer’s post about today’s New York Times story citing a secret Pentagon report that finds that “1 in 7 Rejoin Jihadists After Release,” it’s worth noting that not only has the Pentagon not provided any way of knowing who 45 of the 74 alleged recidivists are, but apparently only five of those named — that’s it, five — “have engaged in verifiable terrorists activity or have threatened terrorist acts.”

So now we’ve gone from 74 prisoners released from Guantanamo that “have returned to terrorism or military activity,” according to the Pentagon, but only 5 of those are verifiable?  On what evidence is the Pentagon basing the other 69? …

Wasn’t It Cheney Who Oversaw the Release of All Those Alleged Recidivists?, by Daphne Eviatar

Why is former Vice President Dick Cheney — who’s planning to speak at the American Enterprise Institute right after President Obama’s national security speech today — going around arguing that President Obama is making the United States less safe, when it’s the Bush administration that released the 534 Guantanamo Bay prisoners, 74 of whom the Pentagon now reportedly believes returned to terrorism? …

UPDATES:
One ‘Recidivist’ Ex-GTMO Detainee Tortured Into Confessing He ‘Returned’ To Terrorism
by Spencer Ackerman

NYT Kind of Walks Back ‘Return’ and ‘Recidivism’ in GTMO Story
by Spencer Ackerman

All of ‘em. Glenn Greenwald points out that for the US, "war president" is redundant. The US is not a peaceful nation—we’re constantly going to war.

Jeremy Scahill in the The Nation:

The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated, 24-year-old Green Beret, who was electrocuted while taking a show at a US base in January 2008. His death, the result of improper grounding for a water pump, has been classified by the US Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) as a "negligent homicide." Maseth’s death had originally been labeled an accident. Bonuses were paid to KBR in 2007 and 2008, after CID investigators had officially expressed concerns about the quality of KBR’s electrical work. For its part, KBR denies any culpability for the electrocution deaths.

This information was revealed at a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. According to the committee’s chair, Sen. Byron Dorgan, the rewards KBR received under its LOGCAP contracts were supposed to be for work of the "highest quality" with "no deficiencies" or problems. Dorgan said KBR’s work was "shoddy" and "unprofessional." Some eighteen US soldiers have died since 2003 as a result of KBR’s "shoddy work," according to Sen. Frank Lautenberg. KBR/Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000, has been the single largest corporate beneficiary of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It continues to operate globally on US government contracts.

Charles Smith, the former Army official who managed the contracts under which KBR performed electrical work in Iraq, testified that it was "highly inappropriate" that KBR received these bonuses for what he called "dangerously substandard" work. He said that the Army was well aware of KBR’s "poor performance" since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, and yet continued to reward KBR because the military was "afraid" KBR would cease work. He said there was "a culture that decided KBR was too big to fail and too important to be held to account." The "perverse incentive is that there was no incentive" for KBR to do quality work because they received bonuses for poor work…

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I added a couple of (short) blocks to the outbound route, so total time today is 33 min 52 seconds. Little by little.

Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

Investigators at the Harvard School of Public Health estimated the toll of behavioral contributors to early mortality.  Obesity, they say, is the #3 cause of death after cigarette smoking and high blood pressure.

Dutch researchers say smoking is what kills people.  Obesity just leads to disability.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says schools could do something to help prevent obesity if they got their act together.  It provides a guide to doing so.

Adam Drewnowski, my colleague and friend at the University of Washington, says: if you want to understand obesity, take a look at what poverty makes people eat.

And Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University tells Nature that obesity is neither an epidemic nor a disease of lifestyle.  It’s all in the genes and in evolution.

I say (see What to Eat): eat less, move more, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and don’t eat too much junk food!

And Washington State University certainly is cowardly. From the Ethicurean:

Washington State University picked The Omnivore’s Dilemma as this year’s “common reading” selection for all incoming freshmen, just as UC Berkeley has for next year’s — and then dropped it, citing budget constraints. Oddly, the university had already purchased more than 4,000 copies of the book. Some on campus say that the university, which has a prominent agriculture college, bowed to pressure from agribusiness  interests.

Maybe agribusiness should just define the curriculum and texts to be used at WSU.

Mike Lillis:

Despite renewed vows to protect Appalachian waterways from the ravages of mountaintop coal mining, the Environmental Protection Agency has recently authorized a number of pending mountaintop permits that will bury dozens of streams in the nation’s oldest mountain range. The move has left mining supporters cheering the federal endorsement of a popular extraction method, environmentalists wondering if the Obama administration truly intends to prioritize water quality concerns above those of the powerful coal industry, and both sides unsure what to expect of mountaintop permitting in the future.

After reviewing 48 pending Appalachian mining applications in recent weeks, the EPA has rejected just six over concerns that the projects would harm local water supplies. Most of the approved projects, EPA says, are surface mines, including some mountaintop removal projects. Combined, EPA concedes, the operations will fill scores of Appalachian valleys with mining waste — a process that will bury miles (some say hundreds of miles) of seasonal mountain streams with debris and sludge known to carry heavy metals and other toxins likely to wash to communities below. The news has caused many strip-mining opponents to worry that the agency has backtracked on earlier vows to put science and the health of ecosystems at the forefront of its permitting decisions.

“A wave of new mountaintop removal coal mines would represent a leap in the wrong direction,” Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said in a statement. “With the bulldozers and explosives standing by in Appalachia, the Obama administration should take bold action to protect communities, streams and mountains before it’s too late.”

The process of mountaintop mining occurs when companies blast away the tops of mountains to get at the thin coal seams nestled inside. The unwanted rock and soil is pushed into adjacent valleys, many of which are home to tiny streams — the headwaters of larger bodies of water below. The strategy is popular for its efficiency: Not only does it allow the companies to scrape away more coal, but it also requires fewer workers to get the job done. The process places greater reliance on the productivities of dynamite and heavy machinery. Opponents argue that it comes at too high a price, ruining water supplies and causing flooding that threatens the communities nearby.

The debate is emblematic of the problems facing the young Obama administration as it tries to make good on promises to protect the environment by blunting the impact of the nation’s coal mining operations, while also being careful not to tread too heavily on the industry, which employs thousands of Appalachian-state workers and provides more than half the country’s electricity.

Indeed, roughly 45 percent of West Virginia’s coal is extracted using mountaintop mining techniques, according to a recent report from the National Mining Association. Throughout Appalachia, the process supports more than 14,000 mining jobs, NMA says.

Symptomatic of the administration’s dilemma have been …

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And he includes solutions. Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times:

Marx Brothers fans will recall that the political philosophy of Rufus T. Firefly in "Duck Soup" boiled down to this:

"If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ’til I get through with it."

I’ve often considered that to be the secret slogan of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration (just substitute "this state" for "this country"). After Tuesday’s election, it’s no longer a secret.

Schwarzenegger had the kind of voter support in 2003 that would have allowed him to tell the voters the harsh but necessary truths about California governance and force real reforms down their throats.
Instead he uttered the same lies about state government and proposed the same nostrums as many of his predecessors: Californians are overtaxed and underserved, etc.

Schwarzenegger promised to close the budget gap by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse," the "snap, crackle and pop" of political pandering. Like every other opportunist running on an "efficiency" platform, he never found any. His cut in the car tax cost the state $3.6 billion per year, making him directly responsible for pretty much all of today’s $21-billion budget deficit

He hoped he could avoid reaping the whirlwind sown by these threadbare clichés. Unfortunately, Tuesday was harvest day.

Let’s list a few of the lies he and our other political leaders have peddled about California’s government and examine how they contributed to this week’s debacle at the ballot box.

The most onerous lie is that Californians are burdened by the highest state taxes in the nation. The truth, according to 2006 figures derived from the U.S. census, is that, as a percentage of all personal income, California’s tax and fee schedule ranks 18th in the country.

Then there’s the canard that we unfairly soak our rich. This is supposedly a no-no, because the rich might flee, taking with them their sterling job-creating potential.

The dirty little secret, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit group, is that California’s wealthiest residents shoulder the lightest burden of any income group in the state. The top 1% of California income-earners (average 2007 income: $2.3 million) paid 7.4% of their income in state taxes last year, counting the federal deduction for state taxes. The highest rate was paid by the poorest residents: Those earning $20,000 or less, with average income of $12,600, forked over 10.2% of their earnings.

This year’s budget deal increased the disparity, raising the effective rate on the rich to 7.8% but that on the poor to 11.1%.

The theme of the ballot campaign was that the state’s chronic budget gridlock could be solved by more gridlock and more borrowing. All lies.

The truth is that real solutions to the budget crisis are obvious.

One: Eliminate, or at least loosen substantially, the two-thirds legislative requirement to pass a budget or raise taxes.

This rule has allowed a tiny Republican minority to hold up all budget progress unless its reactionary program is incorporated in the deal. If the supermajority were pared back even to 60%, they would be unable to block a budget unless they could enlist at least a few moderates in their cause. The improvement in the tone of legislating would be immediate.

Two: …

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