Later On

I found this review of the miracle device via Wicked_Edge, posted by one “rebent.” Well worth the click, and quite valid points.

God save us. The latest FBI inspiration, reported in Salon by Justin Elliott:

New documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has for years been using Census data to “map” ethnic and religious groups suspected of being likely to commit certain types of crimes.

Much is still not known about the apparent large-scale effort in racial profiling, partly because the documents the ACLU obtained through public records requests are heavily redacted.

The FBI maintains that the mapping program is designed to “better understand the communities that are potential victims of the threats,” but the ACLU says it is plainly unconstitutional.

To learn more about the FBI program, its implications for civil liberties and the questions that remain unanswered, I spoke to Michael German, policy counsel at the ACLU’s Washington office and a former FBI agent.

What is the new information that has come to light here?

In 2008, the FBI’s guidelines were changed to create a new category of investigations called assessments, which required no factual predicate. The FBI’s policy in implementing those changes were released around 2010 and showed the FBI was engaged in a program called “domain management,” which included mapping and gathering intelligence on racial and ethnic communities. We were concerned about the program, so we filed a series of Freedom of Information Act  requests across the country and we now have documents that indicate what the FBI has been doing with this new authority. Clearly they have been engaging in crass racial stereotyping of minority groups are linked to certain types of crime, and then using Census information to map entire communities based on their race or ethnicity.

When you say “map,” what does that actually look like in practice?

It’s hard for us to know because all the maps were heavily redacted. It’s clear they are maps. They are using Census data in order to identify anybody who identifies with a certain race or ethnicity. In the Detroit memo, it’s based on adherence to Muslim faith or Middle Eastern origin. The purpose of the program is to identify these communities where the FBI can then conduct intelligence or law enforcement investigations.

So what sort of crimes have they linked to various racial groups?

There was a San Francisco memo that suggested because there was Chinese organized crime, there should be a domain management collection program to identify the entire Chinese community in the San Francisco area. That memo also included an effort to target the Russian-American community. There was an Atlanta FBI memo that purported to analyze the black separatist threat. It documented the population growth of blacks in Georgia as part of the assessment. It also identified a couple of actual organizations, but in the information, what is reported is their First Amendment activities: their appearances at different protests and at a congressional campaign event.

Is the ACLU arguing here that this program is unconstitutional?

Yes, we feel it is unconstitutional — and in many cases actually violates the Department of Justice guidance regarding the use of race in federal law enforcement. That guidance purports . . .

Continue reading. The FBI doesn’t admit error, of course—it famously refuses to re-examine its case against Bruce Ivins, for example—and as a result it is far from a learning organization.

I just reconnected with a friend from my director of admissions days—1971-74—and on hearing that she was playing the piano regularly, I sent her two admirable books (links to secondhand copies):

Playing the Piano for Pleasure, by Charles Cooke: only the hardbound edition works: the author shows how to mark up piano scores to help your playing, and he illustrates it by including a score with original notation in black and his added notations in red. In the paperback version of the book, they went with black ink only, which pretty much destroys the point he was making.

Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History, by Arthur Loesser: a wonderful social history of the piano.

Nowadays I also recommend this movie available on Netflix Watch Instantly: Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.

Turns out I sent her the same two books back in the 70′s. Well, they’re great books. Keep in mind for the piano players you know as we head into gift-giving season.

My view of society is that we (humans) band together so that we are stronger through being able to help one another: we combine our strengths to minimize our individual weaknesses. Thus I am all for social safety nets for the poor, high-quality state-supported education for all (so that the next generation has more tools to bring to the job), and so on. This mindset leads to helping others and accepting help from others.

Modern China has a different outlook, possibly stemming from decades of turmoil, strife, and betrayals: help only those connected to you, avoid everyone else. I think this results in a weaker nation, but the US is moving in that direction from the Right, in which help is seen predicated on the ability to pay for such help from your own pocket. (That is, the Right wants to eliminate most government programs and services—particularly those that serve individual consumers and citizens and particularly those that help the poor, elderly, and other marginalized constituents.)

Here’s where that direction leads: a report by Lijia Zhang in The Guardian, via James Fallows:

Shame on us Chinese! Last Thursday a two-year-old girl was run over twice, about 100 metres from her home in a hardware market district of Foshan, a prosperous city in southern China. As she lay on the ground, writhing in pain, before being hit by the second vehicle, 18 people, on their bicycles, in cars or on foot, passed by but chose to ignore her. Among them a young woman with her own child.

Finally, a 58-year-old female rubbish collector came to the girl’s rescue, but it was too late. By the time she was brought to the hospital, the girl Yueyue, (whose name translates as Little Joy), was brain dead. She was declared dead early on Friday morning. She was a good girl, full of life, her mother said a few days ago in an interview. She said she had just brought Yueyue back from her kindergarten. She popped out to collect the dry clothes and returned to find Yueyue gone – probably trying to look for her elder brother.

It might have been a different story if one of the 18 people had lent Yueyue a hand. None even bothered to call for emergency services. Later, when interviewed by a journalist, one of the passersby, a middle-aged man riding a scooter, said with an uncomfortable smile on his face: “That wasn’t my child. Why should I bother?”

Before giving himself up to the police, the driver of the second vehicle, a van, told the media why he had run away. “If she is dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan (£2,000). But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan.” What’s wrong with these people? How could they be so cold-hearted? The horrific scene was caught by a surveillance camera and has been watched by millions of viewers since it was posted on Youku, China’s equivalent of YouTube.

This is only the latest incident where tragedy has struck as a result of the callous inactivity of onlookers. Last month an 88-year-old man fell over face down at the entrance of a vegetable market near his home. For almost 90 minutes, he was ignored by people in the busy market. After his daughter found him and called an ambulance, the old man died “because of a respiratory tract clogged by a nosebleed”. If anyone had turned him over, he might have survived.

Both cases, the death of Yueyue in particular, have provoked much public outrage and a nationwide discussion about morality in today’s China. From Shanghai, someone with the cybername 60sunsetred wrote: “The Chinese people have arrived at their most morality-free moment!” There was plenty of condemnation of the cold-heartedness of the passersby. But, astonishingly, a large percentage of posters said they understood why the onlookers did not lend a helping hand. Some admitted they would do the same – for fear of getting into trouble and fear of facing another “Nanjing judge”.

Let me explain the story of the muddle-headed Nanjing judge. In 2006, in the capital of Jiangsu province, a young man named Peng Yu helped an old woman who had fallen on the street and took her to a hospital and waited to see if the old woman was all right. Later, however, the woman and her family accused Peng of causing her fall. A judge decided in favour of the woman, based on the assumption that “Peng must be at fault. Otherwise why would he want to help?”, saying that Peng acted against “common sense”. The outcry from the public in support of Peng forced the court to adjust its verdict and resulted in Peng paying 10% of the costs instead of the total. Since that incident Peng has become a national cautionary tale: the Good Samaritan being framed by the beneficiary of their compassion.

It’s true that in China you can get into trouble when you try to help. . .

Continue reading.

No, I’m not going to try a shaving using all my symmetric razors.

Extremely nice shave this morning, beginning with The Shave Den’s Pre-Shave Balm—my last use for a week, since I now begin the “week without” phase—and MR GLO.

I got an excellent lather once more using the little horsehair Vie-Long brush and the Zach vigorous-loading method. Otoko is a very nice shave soap, and those who know shavers might want to consider this as a gift: not something he would be likely to stumble across.

Okay, now to the meat of the shave: a Shark Chrome blade in the OSS and the same Personna 74 tungsten-steel blade in the S3S. I started with the open-comb side.

The two razors do not feel the same: the greater head mass of the S3S has a definite effect. Also the S3S open-comb side is more distinct from the straight-bar side than in the OSS, which the two sides feel more the same.

The first pass went quite well. The longer handle of the OSS feels to me slightly more comfortable than the shorter Bulldog handle, but I would not have noticed had I been using them in separate shaves. I bet the threads are the same so handle switching is possible, but I’m happy also with the Bulldog handle.

The second pass with the straight-bar side went equally well. Both of the razors do extremely good work, smooth and comfortable.

The polishing pass also was fine. The S3S is formidable, without a doubt, and I like the OSS equally: it feels lighter than the S3S, but still quite substantial.

A splash of Paul Sebastian, and I’m set. Terrific razors.

As I was saying in a comment, even a Moleskine-type notebook could serve as a medical journal if one kept it up to date. You’d want things like:

Full contact info for the healthcare professional (physical therapist, doctor, dentist, optometrist, hygienist, lab, whatever) in case you at some point have to track them down.

Date and reason for any office or lab visit, hospital visit, etc.

Prescriptions and supplements taken (date started and, when appropriate, ended)

Lab results

And so on. But that’s far from ideal—for example, if you wanted to know whether you took a particular prescription drug at some point, you’d be in for a lot of page flipping. Also: you’re not going to want to copy reams of lab results, and they’re generally printed in an awkward format. You can just hand-enter some key numbers—for diabetics, things like fasting glucose levels, HbA1c, and the like.

Better, obviously, would be a digital record (easy to make back-up copies, another plus) in the (or, perhaps, merely “an”) Electronic Medical Record standard format. The database could be organized on whatever platform you like, so long as it can read and edit and produce EMR standard records. With a database, sorting and selecting on any field or combination of fields should become easy.

Thus I could give my new doctor my thumb drive of my complete medical history, which could then be read by the doctor’s system and put into the doctor’s database. (And at the end of each office visit, the doctor should really email an EMR of the visit so you can add that to your database.)

Whoa, this got big, fast. I would bet there are already a jillion apps for this. Yep.

I finally tracked down a couple of pages of info I wrote for family in July 2001 about my upcoming LASIK surgery, and that included the surgeon’s name so that we can request his records on me. In the meantime, though, the cataract surgery has been unscheduled until we can get all the needed information in hand.

I continue to think a Medical Journal in which you keep full contact info on any medical/dental/etc. professional you see, along with date, purpose, and outcome of each office visit, list of meds prescribed (updated whenever a med is added to or dropped from the list), surgeries, etc.

A little book or database like this can become quite important as medical visits become more frequent and medical science advances.

I should add that I was convinced I would recognize my LASIK surgeon’s name on sight—it was an unusual name, a single syllable as I recalled: Skink, or Tack, or something like that. When I finally found my little write-up on the prospective surgery: his name was Turner. Stephen Turner.

The palest ink is better than the best memory…

UPDATE: All calm now. First, I did feel a great sense of relief on discovering the LASIK surgeon’s name. Second, I am now convinced that the best course for me is to get the distance lens and not pay $2500 for the Crystalens, a technology still under development and quite possibly I would need some correction with glasses anyway. Much better to simply get the distance lens and use reading glasses for reading. I started wearing glasses in the second grade, so it’s not as though my lifestyle doesn’t accommodate wearing glasses. They’re a pain in playing jai lai, so I don’t play. Problem solved.

We all have our own ways. Rather than whining, I prefer having a sushi lunch. It’s an indulgence, but a practiced one: seaweed salad, nigori sake, hamachi sashimi with a shiso leaf, and a small order (5 pieces) of miscellaneous nigiri sushi: tamago, ebo, unagi, tako, et al. Good balance of protein and starch, and the sake is only a small bottle.

Part of the distress is facing the cataract surgery, but most is because I cannot recall (or find a record of) the name of the surgeon who did my LASIK surgery circa 2001, and the doctor needs that for the cataract surgery… Sigh. Lesson learned: keep a medical journal and record in it all procedures and findings, along with date, doctor, and contact info.

Looks like the cataract in my right eye has gotten thicker and denser and has seriously affected vision in that eye: I could read nothing (nada) on the eye chart.

I learned a few things: the opthalmologist could not give me the cost of the surgery but thought it would be around $5000, of which my insurance will cover 80%. The insurance covers the little acrylic lens that replaces the natural lens, and I get a choice: near vision or distant vision (though either can be corrected to the other via eyeglasses), or (for $2500 from my pocket) I can get the Bausch & Lomb Crystalens that will focus both near and far.

The left lens does have a cataract, though not so bad: that’s the eye I apparently actually am using to see things. The doctor said that once the right eye is working well, I probably will want the left eye done because then I’ll notice that it’s not so good as the right—much as I now want my right eye done.

Office procedure. Drops are involved. I have to see my primary-care physician to get clearance for surgery. I have to track down the guy who did my LASIK surgery about a decade ago and have those records sent to my doctor. (The LASIK affects the algorithms he’ll use to compute the lens—or some such.)

A new adventure!

Take a look and consider how (say) Fox News will make use of this technology.

I imagine these businesses have been prompted by the Federal government to “cooperate” in shutting down Wikileaks. Here’s a report from Mark Seibel of McClatchy:

WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that has been at the center of some of the world’s most controversial news for the past 18 months, is facing dire economic times, largely, the website says, because Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have refused for more than 10 months to process donations made on its behalf.

The total financial cost of what WikiLeaks calls a blockade is uncertain, but the lack of resources mixed with turmoil that has surrounded the organization has kept the website from accepting new documents from would-be leakers for much of the year, its spokesman says.

WikiLeaks said Thursday on its Twitter feed that it would announce a new fundraising effort Monday, but how successful that can be without a lifting of the credit card barrier is an unknown. More than 90 percent of online transactions are handled through credit cards.

That means donors wishing to contribute to WikiLeaks must send money to two European bank accounts, a process that is both cumbersome and expensive. An online auction last month of WikiLeaks memorabilia raised “not a significant amount” of money, according to the spokesman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former television journalist in Iceland.

What large donors the organization has, Hrafnsson said, give primarily to help with legal expenses for the website’s founder, Julian Assange, who is currently awaiting a British court decision on whether he should be extradited to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. Those funds are “separately controlled” by an outside committee, Hrafnsson said.

DataCell, an Icelandic company that had been accepting donations for WikiLeaks, has filed a complaint with the European Commission against Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, saying the refusal to accept donations for WikiLeaks violates European Union trade agreements. Litigation also is being considered against the companies in the United States, Hrafnsson said this week. But there is no date set for a response on the European complaint, and a lawsuit inside the United States would seem to offer little hope for a short-term resolution.

MasterCard did not respond to a request for comment. Spokesmen for Visa and Bank of America, which also refuses to process payments destined for WikiLeaks, declined to comment.

PayPal in an email Friday referred to two statements it had made in December that said it had closed WikiLeaks’ account because the website’s activities violated its service agreement, which forbids payments to organizations that encourage illegal activities — a reference to U.S. charges that documents WikiLeaks was publishing had been purloined by an Army intelligence specialist from an internal U.S. government archive. The statements did not accuse WikiLeaks of illegal activities but said WikiLeaks’ source for the documents had probably broken the law.

To date, neither WikiLeaks nor Assange has been charged with a crime, though Assange reportedly is the subject of a continuing federal grand jury investigation in Virginia. . .

Continue reading.

It is amazing the degree to which the same stupid mistakes never go away: using antibiotics on livestock to expedite the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, for example: perfectly evident that it’s a dangerous practice that will in time cause serious problems, but we continue doing it anyway, exactly as if (as a species) we were terminally stupid. This time we’re goosing along bird flu (because the 1918 pandemic wasn’t bad enough?). Edyta Zielinska reports in The Scientist:

The H5N1 Type A influenza, commonly known as bird flu, is mutating faster in countries that have been implementing wide-scale, but incomplete, vaccinations of poultry, according to a report published online in Vaccine (October 12). The genetic changes accrued by the viruses rendered the vaccinations ineffective, and increased the risk that the virus could jump to humans.

That spotty vaccination campaigns seem “to favor viral mutation, has been suspected for a long time, but this is the first study which is providing hard evidence for it,” Marisa Peyre, a researcher with the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development who was not involved in the research, said in an email.

Bird flu has plagued poultry farmers for years, wiping out entire stocks, and occasionally jumping to the farmers themselves. In 2006, for example, the disease caused 79 human deaths worldwide. That same year, Egypt implemented wide-scale immunization programs against the virus, treating millions of farmed poultry with an H5N1 vaccine. Recent news, however, suggested that such programs were failing, with regular reports of bird and human infections. But it was unclear whether the failure was “caused by the vaccine cold-chain being broken”—thus rendering the vaccine ineffective—or if the virus was changing in a way that allowed it to infect even immunized animals, said first author Giovanni Cattoli, a veterinary scientist  at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie in Italy.

So Cattoli and colleagues, sequenced flu samples collected between 2006 and 2010 in countries that had vaccinated their poultry (Egypt and Indonesia), and compared the sequences to samples from countries that had no immunization programs in place (Nigeria, Turkey, Thailand). The results showed that the viruses circulating in countries with mass vaccination efforts were evolving faster, and had become genetically distinct from the virus that the vaccine was designed to combat. “There are sharp increases in genetic diversity of the virus,” said Cattoli.

Cattoli suspects that the problem stems from . . .

Continue reading. The method used to mitigate harm apparently is to continually repeat, “Maybe nothing bad will happen” until disaster strikes, at which point the mantra changes to, “No one could have foreseen this.”

“Low self-discharge,” words I love to read about rechargeable batteries. Cool Tools reviews Sanyo’s Eneloop rechargeable batteries quite favorably. The review credits Sanyo with developing the low-self-discharge design, so I speculate that the Sanyo 2700 mAh rechargeable NiMH batteries may also be low self-discharge. (The Eneloop batteries are but 2000 mAh.) But I don’t know that for a fact—and if it were true, I would think that they would use the Eneloop brand for those as well. So: you pay your money, you take your choice.

Today I wanted to compare the Frank Shaving brush with some other brush, so I picked the Vie-Long badger+horsehair chimera. The RazoRock shaving cream/soap is new to me—as you can tell from the photo, this tub’s not been used—so I wanted to give it a go.

I did indeed begin with The Shave Den pre-shave balm and MR GLO, as I now do.

First, the Frank: I don’t know what my problem has been, but the Frank Shaving brush was perfectly fine. I am going to revise my beginner brush recommendations to include Frank Shaving brushes as an option. And the Vie-Long badger+horsehair performed quite well, as always. I do rather like the fragrance of the RazoRock shaving cream/soap—I seemed to get a hit of orange from it.

The S3S iKon is a heavy little dude, and thanks to the thickness of the base platform, somewhat head-heavy, which I find (with the Pils, for example) makes for a good shave. (Sledgehammers are also head-heavy for the same reason: momentum loves mass.) Once again iKon has achieved an extremely comfortable razor, which seems to be a characteristic of the brand. (The very first iKon has somewhat harsh, but that model was immediately superseded, and every iKon since has been noticeably comfortable, more so than most razors.)

I used the two sides interchangeably at first. I did note that the open-comb side has no problems whatsoever gobbling up a two-day stubble, though some credit must go to the Personna 74 tungsten-steel blade—Bruce Everiss has a good post on this blade. For the final, against-the-grain polishing pass, I found that I did indeed like the straight-bar side.

This is a terrific little razor. The three-piece design is robust and sturdy, quite apart from the massive stainless steel construction, and it packs flat for travel. I like the stand, which helps this razor stand apart, as it should.

A splash of Royall Vetiver, and I’m ready to talk to the doctor about cataract surgery at 9:30 this morning.

Take a look. Amazing.

Interesting question, eh? Rob Waugh in the Mail Online explains this graphic:

The caption for the graphic:

The 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the globalised economy – connections show partial ownership of one another, and the size of the circles corresponds to revenue. The companies ‘own’ through shares the majority of the ‘real’ economy

The article itself begins:

A University of Zurich study ‘proves’ that a small group of companies – mainly banks – wields huge power over the global economy.

The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them – and created a ‘map’ of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy.

The study found that 147 companies formed a ‘super entity’ within this, controlling 40 per cent of its  wealth. All own part or all of one another. Most are banks – the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. But the close connections mean that the network could be vulnerable to collapse.

‘In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,’ says James Glattfelder, a complex systems theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, who co-wrote the research, to be published in the journal PLoS One.

Some of the assumptions underlying the study have come in for criticism – such as . . .

Continue reading.

TYD passes along a pointer to Ian Sample’s article in the Guardian:

The world is getting warmer, countering the doubts of climate-change sceptics about the validity of some of the scientific evidence, according to the most comprehensive independent review of historical temperature records to date.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found several key issues that sceptics claim can skew global warming figures had no meaningful effect.

The Berkeley Earth project compiled more than a billion temperature records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world and found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

This figure agrees with the estimate arrived at by major groups that maintain official records on the world’s climate, including Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, with the University of East Anglia, in the UK.

“My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical,” Richard Muller, a physicist and head of the project, said.

“Some people lump the properly sceptical in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science. But there have been people out there who have raised legitimate issues.”

Muller sought to cool the debate over climate change by creating the largest open database of temperature records, with the aim of producing a transparent and independent assessment of global warming. . .

Continue reading. Of course, a minority will ignore all evidence in favor of preserving their ignorance and convictions—indeed, we have still among us people who believe that the Earth is flat and the moon landings were all faked. The key is to avoid such people.

Interesting column:

A few weeks ago, we called out the fact that many in the press continued to falsely report that Wikileaks had indiscriminately released all 250,000+ State Department cables that it had in its possession. In fact, this was the key claim that many have used to condemn Wikileaks and to suggest that it’s neither a journalistic entity nor a whistleblowing entity. The problem is, this is false. To date, Wikileaks has only dribbled out approximately 2,000 of the cables and nearly every one has been in conjunction with various mainstream publications and do include redactions of sensitive info.

NPR just got around to correcting the error, even though many of its “hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.”

And yet the myth persists. It’s quite amazing, for example, that the Wall Street Journal allowed famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to publish this attack on Wikileaks as being “different” than Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (a case for which Abrams represented the NY Times). The crux of the “differences” that Abrams highlights is the fact that Ellsberg withheld four out of 47 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, to be published at a later date, and then says:

Can anyone doubt that he would have made those four volumes public on WikiLeaks regardless of their sensitivity? Or that he would have paid not even the slightest heed to the possibility that they might seriously compromise efforts to bring a speedier end to the war?

As Jack Shafer deftly points out over at Slate, why, yes, it’s quite easy to doubt that assertion of Abrams, since Wikileaks has so far withheld much more than Ellsberg did. As Shafer notes:

Perhaps because Abrams listens to too much NPR or doesn’t read the New York Times very closely, he’s under the misconception that WikiLeaks has published all 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables it claims to possess. It hasn’t, as NPR noted in a correction yesterday. WikiLeaks has released just 1,942 cables, which makes Assange’s ratio of released-documents to withheld-documents much, much smaller than Ellsberg’s. By that measure, Abrams should regard Assange as a more conscientious leaker than Ellsberg, not less conscientious.

Abrams’ other reasons for slamming Wikileaks seem self-contradictory. He complains about the “harm” that these leaks will do, while at the same time insisting many of the documents shouldn’t be released because they show no wrongdoing. Again, Shafer debunks this thoroughly: . . .

Continue reading. The never-ending—apparently hopeless—battle of facts against bias, ill-will, ignorance, and stupidity.

Greenwald points out three facts to keep in mind:

President Obama announced today that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year, and this announcement is being seized upon exactly the way you would predict: by the Right to argue that Obama is a weak, appeasing Chamberlain and by Democrats to hail his greatness for keeping his promise and (yet again) Ending the War. It’s obviously a good thing that these troops are leaving Iraq, but let’s note three clear facts before either of these absurd narratives ossify:

First, the troop withdrawal is required by an agreement which George W. Bush negotiated and entered into with Iraq and which was ratified by the Iraqi Parliament prior to Obama’s inauguration. Let’s listen to the White House itself today: “’This deal was cut by the Bush administration, the agreement was always that at end of the year we would leave. . . .’ an administration official said.” As I said, it’s a good thing that this agreement is being adhered to, and one can reasonably argue that Obama’s campaign advocacy for the war’s end influenced the making of that agreement, but the Year End 2011 withdrawal date was agreed to by the Bush administration and codified by them in a binding agreement.

Second, the Obama administration has been working for months topersuade, pressure and cajole Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain in that country beyond the deadline. The reason they’re being withdrawn isn’t because Obama insisted on this, but because he tried — but failed — to get out of this obligation. Again, listen to the White House itself:

The Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Iraq expires at the end of the year. Officials had been discussing the possibility of maintaining several thousand U.S. troops to train Iraqi security forces, and the Iraqis wanted troops to stay but would not give them immunity, a key demand of the administration. . . .

“The Iraqis wanted additional troops to stay,” an administration official said. “We said here are the conditions, including immunities. But the Iraqis because of a variety of reasons wanted the troops and didn’t want to give immunity.”

The Obama administration — as it’s telling you itself — was willing to keep troops in Iraq after the 2011 deadline (indeed, they weren’t just willing, but eager). The only reason they aren’t  is because the Iraqi Government refused to agree that U.S. soldiers would be immunized if they commit serious crimes, such as gunning down Iraqis without cause . As we know, the U.S. is not and must never be subject to the rule of law when operating on foreign soil (and its government and owners must never be subject to the rule of law in any context). So Obama was willing (even desirous) to keep troops there, but the Iraqis refused to meet his demands (more on that fact from Foreign Policy‘s Josh Rogin).

Third, there will still be a very substantial presence in that country, including what McClatchy called a “small army” under the control of the State Department. They will remain indefinitely, and that includes a large number of private contractors.

None of this is to say that this is bad news (it isn’t: it’s good news), nor is it to say that Obama deserves criticism for adhering to the withdrawal plan (he doesn’t). It would just be nice if these central facts — painfully at odds with the two self-serving narratives that started being churned out before the President even spoke — were acknowledged.

I believe the country has not even gotten close to coming to terms with the magnitude of the national crime that was the attack on Iraq (I think that’s why we’re so eager to find pride and purpose in the ocean of Bad Guy corpses our military generates: tellingly, the only type of event that generates collective national celebrations these days).  Needless to say, none of the responsible leaders for that attack have been punished; many continue to serve right this very minute in key positions (such as Vice President and Secretary of State); and (other than scapegoated Judy Miller) none of themedia stars and think-tank “scholars” who cheered it on and enabled it have suffered an iota of stigma or loss of credibility. The aggressive war waged on Iraq began by virtue of a huge cloud of deceit and propaganda; perhaps it could end without that.

Interesting post, which includes this graphic: