No news is good news...
Reuters Says U.S. Troops Obstruct Reporting of Iraq
by Barry Moody
Reuters via AlterNet, 30 September 2005
The conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidental shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war reaching the American public, Reuters said on Wednesday.
In a letter to Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reuters said U.S. forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate. The letter from Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger called on Warner to raise widespread media concerns about the conduct of U.S. troops with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is due to testify to the committee on Thursday.

Times Reporter Free From Jail; She Will Testify
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 30 September 2005
Judith Miller, the reporter for The New York Times who has been jailed since July 6 for refusing to testify in the C.I.A. leak case, was released Thursday from a Virginia detention center after she and her lawyers reached an agreement with a federal prosecutor in which she would testify before a grand jury investigating the case, the publisher and the executive editor of the paper said.
Ms. Miller was freed after spending more than 12 weeks in jail, during which she refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Her decision to testify was made after she had obtained what she described as a waiver offered "voluntarily and personally" by a source who said she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality she had made to him. Ms. Miller said the source had made clear that he genuinely wanted her to testify.
That source was I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, according to people who have been officially briefed on the case. Ms. Miller met with Mr. Libby on July 8, 2003, and talked with him by telephone later that week, they said.
Discussions between officials and journalists that week that may have disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, Valerie Wilson, have been a central focus of the investigation.
Ms. Miller said in a statement that she expected to appear before the grand jury on Friday. Ms. Miller was released after she and her lawyers met at the jail with Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, to discuss her testimony.
The publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said in a statement that the newspaper supported Ms. Miller's decision, just as it had backed her refusal to testify.
"Judy has been unwavering in her commitment to protect the confidentiality of her source," Mr. Sulzberger said. "We are very pleased that she has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver, both by phone and in writing, releasing her from any claim of confidentiality and enabling her to testify."

The Hammer Gets Hit
Ari Berman
The Nation via CBS News, 29 September 2005
The indictment sent a shock wave through the GOP establishment, which is already reeling from a swath of criminal and ethics investigations. Three individuals, eight corporations and two political action committees connected to DeLay have been indicted as a result of the probe. In addition, the government's top procurement official, David Safavian, was arrested in September for obstructing a criminal investigation into über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close DeLay ally. Abramoff himself is under criminal investigation for defrauding Indian tribes and was indicted for wire fraud in Florida in a separate case. Top White House aides, including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, have been targeted by a special prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Representative Duke Cunningham announced he would not run for re-election after overselling his house for $700,000 to a military industry lobbyist; he too has been indicted. FDA chief Lester Crawford resigned unexpectedly after just two months on the job, possibly because of failure to report his wife's sizable pharmaceutical-industry holdings. And DeLay's Senate counterpart, Bill Frist, is battling possible insider-trading charges for dumping millions in HCA stock, a company founded by his father and run by his brother, weeks before it plunged in value. The U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into Frist and HCA in September.
"The fact that Tom DeLay is under criminal indictment and Senate majority leader Bill Frist is under criminal investigation is a historic first," says Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). "This demonstrates the culture of corruption among the Congressional leadership that has become a cancer on our country."
SEE ALSO:
The Designated Hitter
By DAVID BROOKS
NYT, 29 September 2005
...Gingrich and DeLay formed a cold friendship, but their differences were never far below the surface. In 1995, DeLay sent Gingrich's deputy, Dick Armey, a letter demanding that he stop criticizing DeLay in public. Then in 1997, DeLay helped to lead a coup to depose Gingrich as speaker.
The big difference between the two men is that while Gingrich is a self-styled visionary, DeLay is a partisan. Gingrich was quite willing to cut deals with Democrats if it would serve some policy objective. When Gingrich sacrificed some G.O.P. initiatives in order to cut a deal with Bill Clinton to get flood relief to the Midwest, DeLay and others decided it was time to take the speaker down.
The coup failed, but the Gingrich Era ended soon thereafter. The Gingrich Era had been marked by ideological grandiosity and a failed attempt to shrink the size of government. The DeLay Era, which commenced with Gingrich's fall, would be different.
The DeLay Era would be marked by one word: partisanship. Far from being a conservative ideologue, DeLay was a traditional Tammany Hall politician who would do whatever it took to put more Republican fannies in House seats. DeLay was never the ruthless tyrant news media reports made him out to be. He's actually a modest, decent and considerate man. But he is willing to sacrifice all else for the team.
Social conservatism helped the team, so DeLay exploited it. Money from lobbyists could help the team, so DeLay merged K Street and his operations. If federal spending could help the team buy votes, DeLay was willing.

A Sense of Being 'In Country' Iraq
Interview with Dexter Filkins
NPR's Fresh Air, 29 September 2005
New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins has been covering Iraq... thoroughly. In April he received the George Polk Award for War Reporting for his riveting, first-hand account of an eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah.

Pentagon Analyst to Plead Guilty to Leak
AP via NYT, 29 September 2005
A Pentagon analyst charged with providing classified information to an Israeli official and members of a pro-Israeli lobbying group will plead guilty, according to the U.S. District Court clerk's office.
Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, of Kearneysville, W.Va., was indicted in June on charges of leaking classified materials -- including information about potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq -- to two members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and an Israeli official.
Edward Adams, a spokesman for U.S. District Court Clerk in Alexandria, said a hearing to accept Franklin's guilty plea has been scheduled for Wednesday. However, the charges to which he would enter the plea were not disclosed. Franklin was indicted on five charges.
Detailed information about plea agreements is not typically filed in court until the plea is officially entered.
The two AIPAC officials who allegedly received the information, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, have been charged with conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. defense information. No plea hearings have been scheduled in their cases.
Rosen, a top AIPAC lobbyist for more than 20 years, and Weissman allegedly disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 on a variety of topics, including al-Qaida, terrorist activities in Central Asia, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and U.S. policy in Iran, according to the indictment against them.
U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty said in August that Franklin, Rosen and Weissman were motivated by a desire to advance their own foreign policy agendas and careers.
McNulty's office declined to comment Thursday. Franklin's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
The FBI investigation has been closely followed in Washington, where AIPAC is an influential interest group.

29 September 2005

In a Melting Trend, Less Arctic Ice to Go Around
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 29 September 2005
The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping, continuing a trend toward less summer ice, a team of climate experts reported yesterday.
That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.
The change also appears to be headed toward becoming self-sustaining: the increased open water absorbs solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said.
The data was released on the center's Web site, www.nsidc.org.
The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century, when much of the once ice-locked ocean would routinely become open water in summers.

Blood on Their Hands
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 29 September 2005
The special House committee investigating the government's response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe (sometimes known as the Committee to Keep the Heat Off Bush) gave a good thrashing on Tuesday to Michael Brown, the terminally hapless former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
At the moment, nothing's safer politically in the U.S. than pounding the heck out of Brownie. But pummeling a scapegoat, even one as mouthwateringly tempting as the spectacularly clueless Mr. Brown, will not get us closer to understanding the monumental breakdown of government that contributed mightily to one of the greatest tragedies in American history.
For that we need a highly respected and truly independent commission that is willing to root out all the facts, no matter how embarrassing to the people in power, and lay out a reasonable plan for the future. The Bush administration wants no part of that.
On this issue, the American people should take a stand. Government at all levels failed the city of New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, and many died as a result. This was a widely predicted tragedy, and still it was allowed to happen. The mayor of New Orleans, a Democrat by the name of Ray Nagin, should have known better than anyone else in the country that a large portion of his city's population would be unable to evacuate on their own because they didn't have money, or they didn't have cars, or they didn't have a place to go, or they were just too ill to move. He failed in his obligation to them.
Make no mistake: government officials have blood on their hands. Men, women and children - some of them handicapped, some of them elderly or already desperately ill - were condemned to horrible suffering and, in many cases, agonizing deaths. Human beings were left to drown in their flooded homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes and in the street. The American people deserve to know why.

For G.O.P., DeLay Indictment Adds to a Sea of Troubles
By ROBIN TONER
NYT, 29 September 2005
This is not what the Republicans envisioned 11 months ago, when they were returned to office as a powerful one-party government with a big agenda and - it seemed - little to fear from the opposition.
The indictment of Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, on Wednesday was the latest in a series of scandals and setbacks that have buffeted Republican leaders in Congress and the Bush administration, and transformed what might have been a victory lap into a hard political scramble. Republicans are still managing to score some victories - notably, Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s expected confirmation as chief justice of the United States on Thursday - but their governing majority is showing signs of strain.
In the House, Mr. DeLay's indictment removes, even if temporarily, a powerful leader who managed to eke out, again and again, narrow majorities on some difficult votes. In the Senate, Republican ranks have been roiled this week by an investigation of Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, who is under scrutiny for his stock dealings from a blind trust.
Moreover, the string of ethical issues so close together - including the indictment and continuing investigation of the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was close to Mr. DeLay, and the arrest of David H. Safavian, a former White House budget official who was charged with lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Mr. Abramoff - is a source of anxiety in Republican circles.
"Even though DeLay has nothing to do with Frist, and Frist has nothing to do with Abramoff, how does it look? Not good," said William Kristol, a key conservative strategist and editor of The Weekly Standard.
At the same time, the White House is grappling with a criminal investigation into whether anyone leaked the name of a C.I.A. operative, an inquiry that has brought both Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, before a grand jury.
And the administration is struggling to steady itself after the slow response to Hurricane Katrina and defend itself against sweeping accusations of incompetence and cronyism in domestic security.
Joe Gaylord, a longtime Republican consultant and an adviser to Newt Gingrich when he was House speaker, said, "When you couple Iraq, Katrina, DeLay in the House, Frist in the Senate," and other ethical flaps, "it looks like 10 years is a long time for a party to be in power."

Kerry lied about the war costing $200 billion
Senate Measure Would Push Iraq, Afghanistan War Costs to $400 billion
By Liz Sidoti
AP via Seattle Times, 27 September 2005
The Senate would give President Bush $50 billion more for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a $440 billion defense-spending measure a panel approved yesterday.
The House already has approved $45 billion more for the wars as part of its $409 billion version of the bill providing money for the Defense Department for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
Both the Senate and House versions provide for a 3.1 percent pay raise for the military, but the bills differ in other areas. The conflicts must be sorted out before Congress sends the final bill to the president.

28 September 2005

Kabuki in the House...
Former FEMA Director Blames Others
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo!News, 27 September 2005
Former FEMA director Michael Brown aggressively defended his role in responding to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday and put much of the blame for coordination failures on Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.
..."I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it," Brown said.
Brown testified before a special congressional committee set up by House Republican leaders to investigate the government's handling of one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever hit the Gulf Coast.
Democrats, who want an independent investigation not under the control of majority Republicans, largely boycotted the hearing.

Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry
International Crisis Group, 26 September 2005
Instead of healing the growing divisions between Iraq's three principal communities -- Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs -- a rushed constitutional process has deepened rifts and hardened feelings. Without a strong U.S.-led initiative to assuage Sunni Arab concerns, the constitution is likely to fuel rather than dampen the insurgency, encourage ethnic and sectarian violence, and hasten the country's violent break-up.

The administration still cannot account for more than $9 billion which has vanished in Iraq
Big Oil in Iraq Bites Back at Reformers
By Alex Rodriguez
Chicago Tribune via Salt Lake Tribune, 25 September 2005
Corruption in Iraq's oil sector looms as one of the biggest threats to the country's economy, yet it largely has gone unaddressed since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. In testimony before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee in July, RAND Corp. senior economist Keith Crane said it is estimated that a third of Iraqi imports of gasoline and diesel fuel is stolen annually, which this year will cost the country roughly $2 billion.
A report released earlier this year by the auditing firm KPMG disclosed that $69 million in oil produced in Iraq during the second half of 2004 disappeared, sparking concern it had been smuggled.
''People in government, or with government ties, are making hundreds of millions of dollars from the current situation,'' Crane said in a recent interview. ''And they don't want to see that changed.''
As a result, money earmarked for crucial reconstruction projects disappears, a fragile, one-commodity economy stagnates and a restive, war-weary public grows increasingly mistrustful of its fledgling government.

U.S. Envoy Hughes' Message to Muslims: We Care
By Patricia Wilson
Reuters, 26 Sep 2005
U.S. envoy Karen Hughes knows how to stay on message and her message to Muslims is: We care. But it's not clear how many are listening.
When the sagging American image abroad needed a facelift, President George W. Bush turned to Hughes, a close adviser and communications guru who nurtured his own image through two election campaigns.
Her modus operandi then, and now on a trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, is remarkably similar: set basic talking points, stick to them, then keep rolling the tape.
...Hughes has stayed relentlessly on point even in the face of pointed questions.
Ask her, as did an American University student in Cairo why the United States is so intent on "interfering" in the affairs of other countries, she bats it away with: "Are you referring to the Millennium Challenge Accounts?"
When the young woman look mystified, Hughes explained it was a U.S. program tying American development aid to political and economic reforms in recipient countries.
Ask about the invasion of Iraq and the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and she responds that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein and now that the United States is there other countries should join in ensuring Iraq is stable and secure.
Ask about the Arab-Isralei conflict and the answer is: "We want the Palestinians to have jobs and economic opportunity and education and a bright future."
Ask what she hopes to achieve on this, her first trip abroad as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and her first visit to the Middle East, and Hughes explains how she simply wants to listen, then sets modest goals.
"I understand many of the differences are deap-seated and I'm probably not going to change many minds but if I make a connection ... with a person or two that I can keep following up with after I leave here, I will consider it a success."
Unlike most undersecretaries of state who travel rather anonymously, Hughes's entourage includes her deputy, Egyptian born Dina Powell, a spokesman and a traveling press corps of four U.S. television networks, four newspapers and the pan-Arab satellite television channel Al Arabiya.
SEE ALSO:
The Karen Hughes Cleaning Service
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed
Asharq Alawsat, 26 September 2005
Even if the current US administration turned into to the world’s largest cleaning company, it would still be unable to clean its reputation and improve its image in the Arab world. The mission is nearly impossible. I say this in light of the visit by Karen Hughes, the presidential adviser for public diplomacy and public affairs at the US State Department, or in clearer terms, George W. Bush’s cleaner in the Arab region.
As a superpower, the United States has enough enemies and conflicts to keep it up at night. The minority, which believes that in politics no country can be totally good or wholly corrupt, finds itself unable to change reality...
It might be that Hughes believes she will meet journalists and reveal to then what they do not know about her country, its policies, and its president. She might say he was the first to recognize a Palestinian state, strongly encourage democracy and push governments to grant opposition parties more freedom. Bush also insisted local Arab market reform.
The diplomat is deluding herself if she thinks anyone will believe her or show interest in the good deeds she will enumerate. All those she will meet are sure to repeat one word, “Occupation, occupation, occupation”. Her planned meetings will end as they started. Hughes will face an important decision: repair the US’s reputation, which is nearly impossible, or modify the country’s policies, also almost unfeasible. The price to pay will be a Palestinian state, a fundamentalist Iraq, and the ignoring of the region for the next twenty years.

27 September 2005

Lack of Federal Authority Is Not the Problem
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 26 September 2005
More and more from the administration and former administration bunglers we're hearing the line that the problem was insufficient power to use the military in a domestic natural disaster. ...But a simple look at the
facts of what actually happened almost a month ago in Louisiana shows no evidence that anything that went wrong went wrong because the federal government lacked sufficient authority or because the US military was given too small a role.
It's simply not true.
In almost every case, the culprits were fully-empowered civilian officials who proved incompetent at executing their given tasks.
Response to a major natural disaster is basically a civilian mission. It went poorly in this case because because the federal government let the civilian disaster relief infrastructure decay dramatically over the last four years; because there was little thought given in advance to how the federal and state and local authorities should interact in a crisis; because the president and his chief advisors ignored the issue for a critical few days; and because the plans in place at a local level were themselves inadequate to the scale of catastrophe that could have been and was predicted.
Blame it on the locals or blame it on the Feds -- neither storyline requires you or even allows you to claim that things went wrong because the military lacked power to intervene.

New Exit Strategy for Iraq: Civil War
By A.K. Gupta
Z Magazine, September 2005 (sub only)
It’s state-sponsored civil war,” says journalist Dahr Jamail, describing the sectarian conflict engulfing Iraq. From the beginning of the U.S. occupation, most observers argued that while civil war was a distinct possibility between Kurds and Sunni Arabs, a Sunni-Shiite conflict was highly unlikely because of factors such as nationalism, high rates of intermarriage, and the moderating influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.
Jamail, for one, wrote just four months ago that “civil war seems… remote.” He now says that while average Iraqis are still strongly opposed to internecine warfare, the use of ethnic-based militias against the Sunni Arab insurgency has ignited a dirty war that threatens to spiral into a conflict on the scale of Lebanon or the Balkans.
With the war stalemated, repeated deployments wearing down morale of U.S. troops and too few new recruits to maintain force levels, the Bush administration may be deliberately provoking civil war as its “exit strategy.” The goal is not so much to exit Iraq, but leave behind a skeletal military force that would maintain the network of permanent bases under construction throughout Iraq while maintaining access to massive oil deposits in the North and South. Breaking Iraq into a series of mini-states, a strategy being pushed by some White House allies in the media, is seen as one way to ensure these goals.

'Fire Bell' in the Night
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 27 September 2005 (sub only)
The most important decision we'll make in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita isn't whether to rebuild New Orleans. It's how to tackle global warming.
Today we look back at the presidents who preceded the Civil War, and we can't understand how they could have sat on their hands in the face of a threat that proved so devastating to this country. Someday, I fear, Americans are going to look back at today's leaders and wonder the same thing.
Wait one second! You're trying to frightify Americans. ...
Mr. President! How did you get into my keyboard?
It was intelligently designed. But you're evadering - you know hurricanes aren't about global warming.
No, Mr. President - you're the one dodging the issue. Sure, there's no way to link any particular hurricane to global warming. But there's loads of evidence that global warming is already making hurricanes more intense. I don't suppose you saw the report this month in the journal Science that the proportion of hurricanes that are Category 4 or 5 has almost doubled since the 1970's?
No, er, I missed that one. Laura might've read it. ...
And did you see the study published in Nature that says hurricanes have almost doubled in intensity over the last 30 years? Or The Journal of Climate study suggesting that global warming will triple the number of Category 5 hurricanes?
Ugh, I'm waiting for the movie. But how can we believe these studies? Tree-huggers are always exaggificating. A few decades ago, they talked about global cooling; now they worry about warming. They've got less credibility than my Pentagon.

Cronies at the Till
NYT editorial, 27 September 2005 (sub only)
The first results are in on who is set to profit from the Katrina cleanup, and - surprise - many of the firms winning major contracts have big political connections. Congressional investigators are already looking into AshBritt, a Pompano Beach, Fla., company with ties to Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour - the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. AshBritt has nabbed $568 million in contracts for trash removal. Questions have also been raised about the political connections of two other major contractors: the Shaw Group, and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Both companies have been represented by Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency - although Mr. Allbaugh says he does not help any of his clients obtain federal contracts.
And there's more. An article in yesterday's Times by Eric Lipton and Ron Nixon reports that more than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by FEMA for Katrina work were awarded without bidding or with limited competition. The Times article even finds a federal employee - Richard Skinner, the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department - willing to go on the record with his concern, saying, "We are very apprehensive about what we are seeing."

Storm Victims Facing Hurdles on Bankruptcy
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH and RIVA D. ATLAS
NYT, 27 September 2005
When Congress agreed this spring to tighten the bankruptcy laws and crack down on consumers who took on debt irresponsibly, no one had the victims of Hurricane Katrina in mind.
But four weeks after New Orleans flooded and tens of thousands of other residents of the Gulf Coast also lost their homes and livelihoods, a stricter new personal bankruptcy law scheduled to take effect on Oct. 17 is likely to deliver another blow to those dislocated by the storm.
The law was intended to keep individuals from taking on debts they had no intention of paying off. But many once-solvent Katrina victims are likely to be caught up in the net intended to catch deadbeats.
Right after Hurricane Katrina struck, several lawmakers - mostly Democrats but including some Senate Republicans - suggested that storm victims along the Gulf Coast should get relief from the new law's stricter provisions, which are intended to screen filers by income and make those with higher incomes repay their debts over several years. Under the old law, which remains in effect until mid-October, many more filers can have their debts canceled quickly in federal bankruptcy courts.
But House Republicans, who fought off a proposed amendment that would have made bankruptcy filings easier for victims of natural disasters, said there was no reason to carve out a broad exemption just because of the storm.

A Web of Faith, Law and Science in Evolution Suit
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
NYT, 26 September 2005
...Parents in Dover appear to be evenly split on the issue. School board runoffs are in November, with seven candidates opposing the current policy facing seven incumbents. Among the candidates is Mr. Rehm, the former Dover science teacher and a plaintiff. He said opponents had slammed doors in his face when he campaigned and performed a "monkey dance" when he passed out literature at the recent firemen's fair.
But he agrees with parents on the other side that the fuss over evolution has obscured more pressing educational issues like school financing, low parent involvement and classes that still train students for factory jobs as local plants are closing.
"There's no way to have a winner here," Mr. Rehm said. "The community has already lost, period, by becoming so divided."

26 September 2005

Why We Have to Get the Troops Out of Iraq
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 26 September 2005
The hundreds of thousands of protesters who came out throughout the world on Saturday were demanding a US and British withdrawal from Iraq.
The protesters are right that we have to get US ground troops out of Iraq.
The issue is not the rights and wrongs of the war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no nuclear program, and the mushroom clouds with which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice menaced us were figments of their fevered imaginations, no more substantial than the hateful internal voices that afflict schizophrenics.
But that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.
...Basically, if all the US military in Iraq is capable of is operations like Fallujah and Tal Afar, then they really need to get out of the country quick before they drive the whole country, and the region, into chaos.
Even as they are chasing after shadows in dusty border towns, the US military is allowing much of Baghdad to fall into the hands of the guerrillas.
And that is why we have to get the ground troops out. Counter-insurgency has to have both a military and a political track. Even as the enemy is being pressed, you have to reach out to the civilian leadership and try to draw them into a truce.
The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas. Mosul and some parts of Baghdad could have been pointed to in summer of 2004. In summer of 2005, these earlier successes have evaporated like a desert mirage toward which thirsty soldiers race.
...The constitution that was fashioned by the religious Shiites and the Kurds unsurprisingly contains all sorts of goodies for Shiites and Kurds, but cuts the Sunni Arabs permanently out of the deal. Substantial proportions of the oil income will stay in the provinces (i.e. Kurdistan and the Shiite South) rather than going to Baghdad. All future oil fields that are discovered and developed will be the sole property of the provincial confederation in which they are found. Most such likely fields are in the Shiite areas. (There are rumors of a field off Fallujah, but it is not a sure thing).
All the major Sunni Arab organizations and respected political and clerical figures have come out against the constitution.
In the meantime, the US has now attacked another Sunni city, this time the Turkmen stronghold of Tal Afar. In the continued "scorched earth" policy of the US military in the Sunni areas, a joint US/ Iraqi (mostly Kurdish) force appears to have levelled entire neighborhoods in Tal Afar, a northern Turkmen city, making most of its 200,000 inhabitants refugees living in squalid tent camps or with friends and relatives elsewhere.
...Basically, if all the US military in Iraq is capable of is operations like Fallujah and Tal Afar, then they really need to get out of the country quick before they drive the whole country, and the region, into chaos.
Even as they are chasing after shadows in dusty border towns, the US military is allowing much of Baghdad to fall into the hands of the guerrillas.
And that is why we have to get the ground troops out. Counter-insurgency has to have both a military and a political track. Even as the enemy is being pressed, you have to reach out to the civilian leadership and try to draw them into a truce.
The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas.
...Things in the Sunni Arab areas are getting worse, not better.
I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.
Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.
The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

Marching Without Illusion
by Paul Street
ZNet, 24 September 2005
It’s important to make visible large-scale American dissent from the American government’s bloody, illegal, immoral, and brazenly imperialist occupation of Iraq.
It is important also for marchers, organizers, and speakers to show that they and other Americans understand the intimate interrelations between American empire abroad and American inequality at home.
The connection between these inseparably linked evils has recently become more evident than anytime in recent memory. Tropical Storm and Societal Failure Katrina (TSSFK) has taken a lid off the nation’s steep racial and related socioeconomic disparities in ways that reflect poorly on the nation’s commitment to imperial militarism. Large numbers of Americans have been led to reflect anew on the dark absurdity of an unimaginably wealthy society that can’t provide reasonably adequate natural disaster protection and relief for many of its poorest citizens while it can sustain a costly and provocative overseas empire of more than 700 military bases and fight an unjust war in Iraq. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and TSSFK have combined like nothing since the 1960s to suggest the dialectically intertwined nature of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” poverty, racism, and militarism.

A vote for Roberts is a vote that not only consents to placing him on the Supreme Court, it also endorses a process that embraces non-disclosure of political and legal opinions of the individual under consideration. The Senate hearings are now designed to prevent information from being revealed. A reasonable representative of democratic government would never consider sanctioning such a sham.
   --PK

Roberts: A Dangerous Bet
By Ralph G. Neas
Yahoo!News, 22 September 2005
Any Supreme Court nominee must demonstrate a commitment to the constitutional and legal principles that protect Americans' fundamental rights and liberties - especially a nominee for chief justice.
John Roberts failed to meet that test.

Announcement:
On Sunday, September 25, 2005 Markos Moulitsas of "Daily Kos" will interview Professor Juan Cole of "Informed Comment."
OurMedia.org
"I was there during the taping and can tell you that it was very informative. Markos did a great job interviewing Juan Cole, who explained the situation in Iraq with such clarity that I came away from the film shoot with a new understanding of the situation in Iraq."
Tune in on Sunday.

Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense
By Michael Schwartz
Preface by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 22 September 2005
(te)It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon's determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time "enduring camps") in that country. As we know from a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to "withdraw" or "draw down" our Iraqi presence.

Many Contracts for Storm Work Raise Questions
By ERIC LIPTON and RON NIXON
NYT, 26 September 2005
Topping the federal government's list of costs related to Hurricane Katrina is the $568 million in contracts for debris removal landed by a Florida company with ties to Mississippi's Republican governor. Near the bottom is an $89.95 bill for a pair of brown steel-toe shoes bought by an Environmental Protection Agency worker in Baton Rouge, La.
The first detailed tally of commitments from federal agencies since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast four weeks ago shows that more than 15 contracts exceed $100 million, including 5 of $500 million or more. Most of those were for clearing away the trees, homes and cars strewn across the region; purchasing trailers and mobile homes; or providing trucks, ships, buses and planes.
More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse.
Already, questions have been raised about the political connections of two major contractors - the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - that have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA.

22 September 2005

Frist Stock Sale Raises Questions on Timing
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post, 22 September 2005
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even received two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts.
So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time?
Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.
The timing thus raised questions about whether Frist had somehow traded on information he obtained in advance from the company. "Frist has been in the Senate for many years now, and the conflict is not new," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Why did he decide to sell it then? Why not years ago? What's changed? Did he know that the stock was about to take a fall?"
Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said yesterday that Frist "did not have any conversations with HCA executives about HCA stock when he was making the decision to divest." Asked more generally whether he had discussed the company's performance with its executives, she replied, "No."
She said Frist's decision was based "purely on wanting to avoid any future appearances of conflict" while pursuing new health initiatives, and said he had no way of knowing -- under the rules of the blind trusts -- how quickly the stock would be sold. Call promised to provide recent examples of criticism directed at Frist's stock holdings, but all those she eventually cited occurred before May 2004.

Gaming the Price of Leadership
NYT, 22 September 2005
Never underestimate the brazenness of incumbent politicians determined to sneak unfair rule changes into the game. Incumbent treachery is under way in the Senate, where Republicans are using a big spending bill as cover to try to gut campaign donation limits and give themselves an eight-to-one spending advantage over election challengers.
The move has the two champions of the campaign finance reform law - John McCain of Arizona and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin - livid, and demanding a showdown vote. That's the least this sorry bit of political greed deserves. Any lawmaker who supports it should be put on a watch list of those machine hacks capable of stealing hot stoves.
The plan, slipped into the transportation spending bill, would free incumbents to make unlimited "soft money" donations to the national party from their misnamed "leadership" political action committees. These are lawmakers' secondary campaign slush funds, in effect, but with a spending range limited by law until now. Under the Senate's snooker move, an incumbent's donation to the national party would be free for recycling right back through the new loophole as found money for the donor's own campaign. Allowing that would circumvent the three-year-old reform limits and establish dual campaign standards: a free and easy one for incumbents, and a tight one for challengers, barred from running "leadership" kitties. Challengers would be restricted to collecting $4,200 per person for a campaign, while a senator could collect $34,200 per donor for the same race.
The shamelessness of this ploy is underscored by its inclusion in a bill that includes some emergency money for Hurricane Katrina repairs - added cover, no doubt, in the eyes of supporters, whose first priority is political self-preservation.

Say it ain't so, Doc...
Possible Conflicts for Doctors Are Seen on Medical Devices
By REED ABELSON
NYT, 22 September 2005
...in a variety of ways, many doctors have unusually close, if largely unseen, ties to device makers. And those relationships are a central issue on an emerging battleground in the health care wars: the upward cost spiral of implantable medical devices.
Countless patients have been helped by these new technologies - artificial knees that allow aging weekend athletes to play on, stents that help keep once-clogged arteries clear, defibrillators that correct potentially fatal heart arrhythmias.
But the rising cost of the devices and the relationships between doctors and manufacturers are causing profound concern among hospital executives, health care economists and other experts, mirroring recent reactions to the way pharmaceuticals are marketed. In the last two years, Medicare payments to hospitals for implant surgery have risen about 40 percent, from $10 billion to $14 billion, according to an analysis of Medicare records. And federal prosecutors have begun to investigate some device makers' deals with doctors, trying to determine if they amount to payoffs for using a product.
Among the loudest objectors have been hospitals, which buy the devices and most immediately feel the pain. But health care economists stress that consumers and insurers are also hurt by the rising cost of medical technology, including implantable devices.
"We're paying for it, but no one can see it," said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a research group in Washington.
The device companies occupy a privileged corner of the medical economy, where many of the checks and balances that have come to govern health care costs simply do not apply. Hospital officials and health care experts say the companies have used their relationships with doctors and a climate of secrecy to ensure that their products remain unusually profitable.

Iraq, Afghan Commitments Fuel U.S. Air Base Construction
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post, 17 September 2005
The Soviets built a runway here more than 20 years ago to land fighter jets. The Americans, having pretty much worn that one out with their jumbo cargo planes, are building a new, longer strip meant to withstand the U.S. military's heaviest loads.
The construction, at the four-year mark in America's military presence in Afghanistan, isn't stopping there. Plans call for expanded ramps for fighter jets and helicopters, multiple ammunition storage bunkers and a six-story control tower, for a total bill exceeding $96 million.
An even more expensive airfield renovation is underway in Iraq at the Balad air base, a hub for U.S. military logistics, where for $124 million the Air Force is building additional ramp space for cargo planes and helicopters.
And farther south, in Qatar, a state-of-the-art, 104,000-square-foot air operations center for monitoring U.S. aircraft in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa is taking shape in the form of a giant concrete bunker. The $500 million price tag includes a set of support facilities that would be the envy of any air force.
All in all, the U.S. military has more than $1.2 billion in projects either underway or planned in the Central Command region -- an expansion plan that U.S. commanders say is necessary both to sustain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and to provide for a long-term presence in the area.
But the building boom has raised questions, particularly in view of expectations that fewer U.S. troops will be engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan starting next year.

Report: Hurricane Tax Aid Does More for Wealthier Survivors
By MARY DALRYMPLE
AP, 20 September 2005
Tax breaks designed to help Hurricane Katrina victims get their hands on needed cash could do more for higher income survivors than for the neediest, a congressional report says.
The Congressional Research Service, an office that provides nonpartisan legislative analysis to lawmakers, pointed to several items in virtually identical bills that passed in the House and Senate last week.
One helps hurricane victims get access to their savings by waiving penalties imposed on taxpayers who tap into their retirement savings accounts before retirement. Others let taxpayers write off more of their destroyed property, and erase taxes regularly imposed when a debt, like a mortgage, is forgiven.
The report says lower income survivors are less likely to have retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs to tap into for recovery. Because many lower income individuals and families pay little tax, assistance efforts that lower their taxes may do little good, the report said.

Pentagon Nixes 9/11 Hearing Testimony
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
AP via The Guardian, 21 September 2005
The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about the work of a secret military unit that identified four 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, according to the man's attorney.
In written testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, attorney Mark Zaid, who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents.
The Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hear testimony about the work of a classified unit code named ``Able Danger.''
In his prepared remarks, Zaid was ready to say on behalf of Shaffer and contractor John Smith that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 - including mastermind Mohamed Atta.
``At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of Mohamed Atta,'' Zaid said in his prepared remarks.
The Defense Department had no immediate comment.

21 September 2005

Pork alone won't pay for Katrina:
A Million Here, a Million There...
By Mark Schmitt
TPM Cafe, 21 September 2005
...But this project should continue, because it will provide provide participants with an education in the actual insignificance of domestic discretionary spending, of which "pork" is a small part, in the bigger context of war, reconstruction, and tax cuts. Eventually participants will grasp the truth of what budget expert Stan Collender writes this week in his National Journal column:

President Bush either is wrong, mistaken, or misleading: The significant additional federal spending because of Hurricane Katrina absolutely will not be offset with cuts to other programs.
There are two reasons. First, there isn't enough "unnecessary" spending or waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget to pay for the federal costs of Katrina, which are now expected to total at least $200 billion in fiscal 2006 alone. That may be hard to believe in a budget that will approach $2.6 trillion next year. But when you subtract those things the White House will not want to cut -- Social Security, interest on the debt, most other federal mandatory spending, the Pentagon, the costs of activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security and foreign aid -- there is only about $500 billion left to be scrutinized. Completely offsetting Katrina-related costs would mean that all other programs would have to be cut by about 40 percent, a ridiculous notion under virtually any circumstances.

Bush's Waterlogged Halo
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 21 September 2005 (sub only)
Following President Bush's speech in New Orleans, many U.S. papers carried the same basic headline: "Bush Rules Out Raising Taxes for Gulf Relief." The president is planning to rely on "spending cuts" instead to pay for rebuilding New Orleans. Yeah, right - and if you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Biloxi I'd like to sell you. The underlying message of all these stories is that the Bush team sees no reason to change course in response to Katrina.
I beg to differ. Katrina deprived the Bush team of the energy source that propelled it forward for the last four years: 9/11 and the halo over the presidency that came with it. The events of 9/11 created a deference in the U.S. public, and media, for the administration, which exploited it to the hilt to push an uncompassionate conservative agenda on tax cuts and runaway spending, on which it never could have gotten elected. That deference is over.
...Setting the goal of energy independence, along with a gasoline tax, could help to solve so many of our problems today - from the deficit to climate change and national security. And Americans would pay it if they thought the extra money was going to renew America, not Iran, and not just New Orleans. And if the Texas-oilman president became the energy-independence president - now, that would snap heads and make this a truly relevant presidency.
No way, you say. Probably right. But either Mr. Bush does a Nixon-to-China or his next three years are going to be a Bush-to-Nowhere.

Message: I Can't
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 21 September 2005 (sub only)
...There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."
"We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job," he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to "think bold," while they still need to think mold.
Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.
...The more the president echoes his dad's "Message: I care," the more the world hears "Message: I can't."

Tragedy in Black and White
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 19 September 2005 (sub only)
By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.
The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"

20 September 2005

Making the Gulf Coast a Right-Wing Laboratory
Letter announcing a speech given by John Kerry, 19 September 2005
The rush now to camouflage their misjudgments and inaction with money does not mean they are suddenly listening. It's still politics as usual. The plan they're designing for the Gulf Coast turns the region into a vast laboratory for right wing ideological experiments. They're already talking about private school vouchers, abandonment of environmental regulations, abolition of wage standards, subsidies for big industries, and believe it or not yet another big round of tax cuts for the wealthiest among us!

Paranoid? Note this general trend in the drug industry...
Study Finds Little Advantage in New Schizophrenia Drugs
By BENEDICT CARE
NYT, 20 September 2005
A landmark government-financed study that compared drugs used to treat schizophrenia has confirmed what many psychiatrists long suspected: newer drugs that are highly promoted and widely prescribed offer few - if any - benefits over older medicines that sell for a fraction of the cost.
The study, which looked at four new-generation drugs, called atypical antipsychotics, and one older drug, found that all five blunted the symptoms of schizophrenia, a disabling disorder that affects three million Americans. But almost three-quarters of the patients who participated stopped taking the drugs they were on because of discomfort or specific side effects.
...The study, released yesterday and to be published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, was widely anticipated because it is by far the largest, most rigorous head-to-head trial of the newer antipsychotics conducted without significant drug industry financing. The new drugs account for $10 billion in annual sales and 90 percent of the national market for antipsychotics.
The findings may not significantly alter the prescribing patterns of doctors in private practice, who often do not have to worry about cost, psychiatrists said. But they are likely to have an enormous effect on state Medicaid programs, many short on funds in part because of the high cost of schizophrenia drugs.

What has Happened to Iraq's Missing $1bn?
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
The Independent, 19 September 2005
One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons.
The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion, was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared.
"It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister, told The Independent.
"Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."
The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong army from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do.
Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armoured cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armour. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armoured cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.
Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly equipped.

Ex-White House Aide Charged in Corruption Case
By PHILIP SHENON and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 20 September 2005
A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for more than a year.
The arrest of the official, David H. Safavian, head of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, was the first to result from the wide-ranging corruption investigation of Mr. Abramoff, once among the most powerful and best-paid lobbyists in Washington and a close friend of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.
According to court papers, Mr. Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance that he gave Mr. Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002.
Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Mr. Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Mr. Safavian's arrest. But "Lobbyist A" in an F.B.I. affidavit could only be Mr. Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the Federal District Court here.
The Justice Department said Mr. Safavian had been specifically charged with making false statements to investigators about his efforts at the General Services Administration in 2002 to help Mr. Abramoff acquire two large pieces of government-owned property in the Washington area, including the historic Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
...In an interview in June with Federal Times, a newspaper that focuses on the workings of the federal government, Mr. Safavian described his work for the office and said that "the best advice I've gotten was from my grandfather and that advice is that you've got to have ethics and integrity in everything you do, especially here in D.C."

Bush Administration Paradox Explained
by Robert Reich
San Francisco Chronicle via Common Dreams, 19 September 2005
The White House's strategy to make John Roberts the next chief justice has been the very model of meticulous planning, by contrast to its utter clueless-ness in dealing with Katrina. No White House in modern history has been as adept at politics and as ham-fisted at governing. Why?
With politics, the Bush administration has shown remarkable discipline -- squelching leaks and keeping Cabinet members on message, reaching down into the bureaucracy to bend analyses in directions that supports what it wants to do, imposing its will on congressional leaders and even making a political imprint on state legislatures. No recent president has got re-elected with controlling majorities in both houses of Congress, or been as successful in repositioning the national debate around his ideological view of the world.
With governing, it's been almost criminally incompetent -- failing to act on clear predictions of a terrorist attack like 9/11 or a natural disaster like Katrina, botching intelligence over Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, failing to secure order after invading Iraq, allowing prisoners of war to be tortured, losing complete control over the federal budget, creating a bizarre Medicare drug benefit from which the elderly are now fleeing, barely responding to the wave of corporate lootings and running the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the ground. Not since the hapless administration of Warren G. Harding has there been one as stunningly inept as this one.
...the same discipline and organization that's made the White House into a hugely effective political machine has hobbled its capacity to govern. Blocking data from lower-level political appointees and civil servants that's inconsistent with what it wants to do or sheds doubt on its wisdom, for example, may be effective politics, in the short term. It keeps the media and the opposition party at bay.
But the same squelching of troublesome information prevents top policy makers from ever getting the data they need. Operatives in the CIA suspected Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction and personnel at the Department of State knew the plan to invade Iraq was seriously flawed, but such judgments were suppressed by a White House that made perfectly clear what it wanted and didn't want to hear. Career professionals at the CIA and the Department of State are now wary of sharing what they know with appointed officials, as are scientists and experts all over the federal government.
Similarly, a White House whose Cabinet officers all deliver the same, positive lines can be a formidable message machine. But this same discipline also discourages internal dissent, for the simple reason that in Washington nothing stays completely private. The predictable result is that Bush officials have become yes-men incapable of sounding alarms. The price of dissent is high. Soon after Glenn Hubbard, then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, warned that the cost of the Iraqi war would be in the range of $200 billion -- almost exactly what it's cost so far -- he was fired. After Paul O'Neill, his Secretary of the Treasury, worried out loud that federal budget deficits didn't seem to matter any longer -- a prescient concern -- he was fired, too. Can it be any wonder why this president doesn't seem to get it?

Poor Planning and Corruption Hobble Reconstruction of Iraq
By CRAIG S. SMITH
NYT, 18 September 2005
In April, Najaf's main maternity hospital received rare good news: an $8 million refurbishment program financed by the United States would begin immediately. But five months and millions of dollars later, the hospital administrators say they have little but frustration to show for it.
"They keep saying there's renovation but, frankly, we don't see it," said Liqaa al-Yassin, director of the hospital, her exasperated face framed by a black hijab, or scarf. "Each day I sign in 80 workers, and sometimes I see them, sometimes I don't."
She walks a visitor through the hospital's hot, dim halls, the peeling linoleum on the floors stained by the thousands of lighted cigarettes crushed underfoot. Anxious women, draped in black head-to-foot chadors, or veils, sit in the sultry rooms fanning their sick children.
"My child has heart problems, she can't take this heat," pleaded one mother as Dr. Yassin walked past.
The United States has poured more than $200 million into reconstruction projects in this city, part of the $10 billion it has spent to rebuild Iraq. Najaf is widely cited by the military as one of the success stories in that effort, but American officers involved in the rebuilding say that reconstruction projects here, as elsewhere in the country, are hobbled by poor planning, corrupt contractors and a lack of continuity among the rotating coalition officers charged with overseeing the spending.
"This country is filled with projects that were never completed or were completed and have never been used," said a frustrated civil affairs officer who asked not to be identified because he had not been cleared to speak about the reconstruction.

18 September 2005

Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH
NYT, 18 September 2005
...The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.
This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)

Global Warming 'Past the Point of No Return'
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
The Idependent, 16 September 2005
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.
The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.
Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.
Scientists are now preparing to report a record loss of Arctic sea ice for September, when the surface area covered by the ice traditionally reaches its minimum extent at the end of the summer melting period.
Sea ice naturally melts in summer and reforms in winter but for the first time on record this annual rebound did not occur last winter when the ice of the Arctic failed to recover significantly.

A Wimp on Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT, 18 September 2005
President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.
It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.
It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.
Mr. Bush's position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an "obligation" to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted to say that "We are prepared to take collective action ... on a case by case basis" to prevent genocide.
That was still an immensely important statement. But it's embarrassing that in the 21st century, we can't even accept a vague obligation to fight genocide as we did in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If the Genocide Convention were proposed today, President Bush apparently would fight to kill it.

The Disaster Behind the Disaster: Poverty
By DANIEL ALTMAN
NYT, 18 September 2005
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people watching images of poverty along the Gulf Coast may have wondered, "How many poor places like this are there in this country?" The easy answer is, quite a few.
But why poverty persists in certain areas is a complex problem, and what can be done to help isn't always clear.
The Census Bureau defines poverty using a formula based on a family's age profile and its ability to buy a standard basket of necessities. Prices differ across regions, meaning that a family just above the poverty line and living in, say, San Diego may have a harder time making ends meet than one that is just below that line and living in Pascagoula, Miss. Also, not everyone who is poor at one point in a year is poor for the whole year.
Accepting the Census Bureau's measure, there were about 37 million poor people in the United States last year - about one of every eight Americans. The share is only slightly higher in rural areas than in urban areas, according to the Agriculture Department, and these figures have been converging over time.
Poverty tends to be concentrated in certain places, some of which, like Appalachia, are very large; others are no bigger than a few city blocks. To fight poverty, one has to understand its source. Were these places always poor? Did they become collecting bowls for poor people? Or do they make people poor?
"The answer is all of the above," said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Some regions, like Appalachia, have been poor for so long because of well-known historical and geographical factors, she said. Some cities, too, have been victims of long-term trends, like the decline in manufacturing in the Midwest.
In rural areas, the most persistent poverty - above 20 percent of the population for the last four censuses, dating back to 1970 - has been concentrated in a few swaths of the country. The largest section stretches in two directions - from northwestern Louisiana, up the Mississippi and east to North Carolina. The other concentrations are in central Alaska, around the Four Corners area of the Southwest, in southern Texas along the Mexican border, and in the heart of the Appalachians in eastern Kentucky.

Widespread Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
NYT, 18 September 2005
A hunger strike at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has unsettled senior commanders there and produced the most serious challenge yet to the military's effort to manage the detention of hundreds of terrorism suspects, lawyers and officials say.
As many as 200 prisoners - more than a third of the camp - have refused food in recent weeks to protest conditions and prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them. While military officials put the number of those participating at 105, they acknowledge that 20 of them, whose health and survival are being threatened, are being kept at the camp's hospital and fed through nasal tubes and sometimes given fluids intravenously.
The military authorities were so concerned about ending a previous strike this summer that they allowed the establishment of a six-member prisoners' grievance committee, lawyers said. The committee, a sharp departure from past practice in which camp authorities refused to cede any control or role to the detainees, was quickly ended, the lawyers say.
Maj. Jeffrey J. Weir, a spokesman at the base, said that the prisoners who are being fed at the hospital are generally not strapped to their beds and gurneys but are in handcuffs and leg restraints. A 21st prisoner at the hospital is voluntarily accepting liquid food.
Major Weir said the prisoners usually accept the nasal tubes passively because they know they will be restrained and fed forcibly if necessary. "We will not let them starve themselves to the point of causing harm to themselves," he said, describing the process as "assisted feeding" rather than force-feeding. On at least one occasion, he said, a prisoner was restrained and forcibly fed.
One law enforcement official who has been fully briefed on the events at Guantánamo said senior military officials had grown increasingly worried about their capability to control the situation. A senior military official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the situation as greatly troublesome for the camp's authorities and said they had tried several ways to end the hunger strike, without success.

The President's Gulf Coast Wage Cut May Be Illegal
By Rep. George Miller (D-CA)
From: TPMCafe Special Guests, 17 September 2005
The President suspended wage standards for workers on the Gulf Coast before he declared a national emergency. That means he was so focused on cutting the wages of people who'd be returning to the Gulf Coast to rebuild their lives and their communities that, in order to hasten the suspension, he failed to follow the law. And at the same time the White House was cutting workers' wages, it was busy awarding no-bid contracts. The President has proven once again that he's more interested in governing for the few than in governing for all of us.
The President's pay cut affects tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of Americans who desperately need a decent income to rebuild their lives. People working construction jobs in the Gulf Coast might only have earned $7 or $8 in the first place; now, the only protection left for them is the federal minimum wage, which is a disgraceful $5.15 an hour because Republicans repeatedly refuse to increase it.
What the President has done is immoral.

17 September 2005

FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and ERIC LIPTON
NYT, 17 September 2005
Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.
Federal officials are often unable to give local governments permission to proceed with fundamental tasks to get their towns running again. Most areas in the region still lack federal help centers, the one-stop shopping sites for residents in need of aid for their homes or families. Officials say that they are uncertain whether they can meet the president's goal of providing housing for 100,000 people who are now in shelters by the middle of next month.
While the agency has redoubled its efforts to get food, money and temporary shelter to the storm victims, serious problems remain throughout the affected region. Visits to several towns in Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as interviews with dozens of local and federal officials, provide a portrait of a fragmented and dysfunctional system.

Disney on Parade
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 17 September 2005
The president, as he fondly recalled the other day, used to get well lit in New Orleans. Not any more.
On Thursday night, Mr. Bush wanted to appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of a eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney World. (Must be Sleeping Beauty's Castle, given the somnambulant pace of W.'s response to Katrina.)
All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.
...In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?
The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting - the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for "Monday Night Football" and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.
Before the presidential address, Mr. DeServi was surveying his handiwork in Jackson Square, crowing to reporters about his cathedral: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud."
As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.
The president is still looking for a tiny spot of unreality in New Orleans - and in Iraq, where a violent rampage has spiked the three-day death tally to over 200.

Hearing A Faint Iraq Strategy
Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.com, September 16, 2005
A glimmer of hope emerged yesterday on Capitol Hill that at least some lawmakers are thinking about how to end the war in Iraq. More than two dozen members of Congress—including one Republican, Walter Jones of North Carolina (representing Camp Lejeune)—took part in an extraordinary hearing organized by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D.-Calif., on ending the war, with testimony from a panel of experts that included former Sen. Max Cleland. "I have concluded that the best way to support the troops is with an exit strategy from Iraq," said Cleland, a gravely wounded veteran of the Vietnam conflict. "We need an exit strategy we choose or it will certainly be chosen for us." He added: "The key word in 'exit strategy' is not 'exit,' but 'strategy.'"
The hearing was held in a tiny corner room in a House office building, with barely enough room for members of Congress and half a dozen panelists to sit crammed in cheek by jowl, because Republicans wouldn't cede any meeting space for Woolsey's event. Still, the fact that so many Democrats showed up shows that, despite the GOP's fealty to the White House, the search for answers on the quagmire in Iraq is more and more getting the attention of members of Congress.

A Frustrating Week at the U.N. for the White House Team
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NYT, 17 September 2005
After weeks of trying to rally international support to confront Iran over its nuclear program and to reform the United Nations, the Bush administration has had an unusually frustrating week, rebuffed by crucial partners and also by a coalition of poor countries increasingly resentful of American power.
The result is that the drive to press Tehran over its suspected nuclear weapons program has stalled, as have efforts to introduce sweeping budgetary changes at the United Nations and to scrap the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
"The work of diplomacy doesn't always proceed at the pace you would hope," a senior State Department official said, saying he could be more candid if not quoted by name. "Do we wish the results of a week of diplomacy would be more clear-cut? Yes. But at least everybody feels we're moving in the right direction."
The Iranian situation has been at an impasse for weeks, as the United States and its European partners have sent envoys to countries around the world to rally support for a vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency's board meeting next week to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible condemnation or sanctions.
But India and Russia have balked, despite personal appeals by President Bush. At the White House on Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin again expressed misgivings about rushing things with Iran.
..."The way the United Nations is run, the vast number of less developed countries sitting in the General Assembly hold the power of the purse," a diplomat at the United Nations said. "A lot of developing countries see giving more authority to the secretary general as a ploy by the U.S. and the Europeans to take more control of the U.N."

Republicans Join in Call for Release of Report on C.I.A.
By DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 17 September 2005
Senior Republican members of Congress have joined Democrats in asking Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, to declassify and make public an internal agency report that criticizes his predecessor, George J. Tenet, and others for lapses on terrorism in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The requests were sent last week by leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, said members of Congress and their aides. They add to the pressures on Mr. Goss, who has made clear that he would prefer not to make the report public, at least in part because its publication could be damaging to the agency's morale.
Mr. Goss is also still weighing difficult decisions about whether to impose any kind of disciplinary action against the dozen or so current and former intelligence officials, including Mr. Tenet, who are said to have been singled out in the report.
The report was prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general, John L. Helgerson, at the request of the joint Congressional committee that completed its own review in 2002 of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Goss delivered a highly classified version of the document to Capitol Hill last month, and Mr. Helgerson has briefed the Intelligence Committees on his findings, but distribution of the report has otherwise remained very limited.
...Current and former government officials who have seen Mr. Helgerson's report or been briefed on it have said it faulted Mr. Tenet as failing to develop a strategic plan against Al Qaeda and carry it out in the years before 2001. Others who are said to be criticized in the document include James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director of operations, and J. Cofer Black, the former director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center, though the report also offers praise for some specific actions taken by them and others, they said.
Mr. Tenet is specifically censured, even after he wrote in a 1998 memorandum to intelligence agencies that "we are at war" with Al Qaeda, according to the officials, who have agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, because the report itself remains highly classified. But Mr. Tenet's supporters have argued that a C.I.A. effort known as "The Plan," instituted in 1998, amounted to exactly such a strategy.
In its report last year, the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks cited that 1998 plan as evidence that the C.I.A., under Mr. Tenet, was the most proactive agency within the government in trying to counter the terrorist threat.

In 4-Year Anthrax Hunt, F.B.I. Finds Itself Stymied, and Sued
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 17 September 2005
Richard L. Lambert, the F.B.I. inspector in charge of the investigation of the deadly anthrax letters of 2001, testified under oath for five hours last month about the case.
But Mr. Lambert was not testifying in a criminal trial. He and his teams of F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors have not found the culprit. Instead, he and six other F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have been forced to give depositions in a suit over news media leaks filed by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former Army biodefense expert who was under intensive scrutiny for months.
Four years after an unknown bioterrorist dropped letters containing a couple of teaspoons of powder in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., what began as the largest criminal investigation in American history appears to be stalled, say scientists and former law enforcement officials who have spoken with investigators.
The failure to solve the case that the authorities call "Amerithrax" is a grave disappointment for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Postal Inspection Service, the investigative arm of the Postal Service. The letters were the first major bioterrorist attack in American history and killed five people, sickened 17 others, temporarily crippled mail service and forced the evacuation of federal buildings, including Senate offices and the Supreme Court.

16 September 2005

Amid the Ruins, a President Tries to Reconstruct His Image, Too
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
NYT, 16 September 2005
George W. Bush, whose standing for the last four years has rested primarily on issues of war and peace, introduced himself to the nation on Thursday night in an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable new role: domestic president.
The violence of Hurricane Katrina and his faltering response to it have left to Mr. Bush the task not just of physically rebuilding a swath of the United States, but also of addressing issues like poverty and racial inequality that were exposed in such raw form by the storm.
The challenge would be immense for any president, but is especially so for Mr. Bush. He is scrambling to assure a shaken, angry nation not only that is he up to the task but also that he understands how much it disturbed Americans to see their fellow citizens suffering and their government responding so ineffectually.

Iraq: No Exit?
Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.com, September 2005
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., leads rump Democratic hearings today on the quagmire in Iraq and whether or not the United States can extricate itself. Testifying will be luminaries such as Gen. Joe Hoar, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for the region; David Mack, a retired U.S. ambassador with wide service in the Middle East and Iraq; ex-Senator Max Cleland; and others. Woolsey hopes that the hearings will help prompt the Bush administration to start thinking about how to get out of Iraq and to “discuss strategies to achieve military disengagement while still playing a constructive role in the rebuilding of Iraqi society.”
So far, surprisingly, very little concrete thinking has emerged from Washington, D.C., think tanks on anything related to getting out: not for a negotiated settlement of the war in Iraq, not for how to implement a unilateral withdrawal, not for how to set a date and get out—in other words, not for much. Calls to the august Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and other establishment centers of what purports to be “realist” thinking reveal that lots of professional worry warts are blackly pessimistic about the future of Iraq, but literally no one at the main tanks—at least, that I can find—has put forward a credible strategy for ending the war.

Not the New Deal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 16 September 2005
...to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.
That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.
Turning the funds over to state and local governments isn't the answer, either. F.D.R. actually made a point of taking control away from local politicians; then as now, patronage played a big role in local politics.
And our sympathy for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana shouldn't blind us to the realities of their states' political cultures. Last year the newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter ranked the states according to the number of federal public-corruption convictions per capita. Mississippi came in first, and Louisiana came in third.
Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).
He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.

Insurgents Strike Baghdad Again; Two-Day Death Toll Nears 200
AP via NYT, 16 September 2005
Suicide bombers struck the capital again on Thursday, killing at least 31 people in two attacks about a minute apart and lifting the death toll in two days of carnage to nearly 200.
A dozen bombings during a nine-hour spate of terror on Wednesday killed at least 167 people and wounded nearly 600 in Baghdad's worst day of bloodshed since the United States-led invasion in March 2003.
American officials blamed the onslaught on efforts by the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency to answer a successful joint United States-Iraqi offensive last week in the northern city of Tal Afar and to spark sectarian strife in hopes of undermining the Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's proposed constitution.
"These spikes of violence are predictable around certain critical events that highlight the progress of democracy," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the chief American military spokesman in Iraq.
...The United Nations planned to print and distribute five million copies of Iraq's draft constitution before the Oct. 15 referendum, a spokesman said Thursday. The spokesman, Farhan Haq, said officials hoped the Iraqi Parliament would sign off on the text by Sunday. "Once the transitional National Assembly designates a final draft constitution, we stand ready to assist in printing it and distributing that draft constitution so that the Iraqi people can make an informed choice in the upcoming referendum," Mr. Haq said.

Sick and Abandoned
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 16 September 2005
It was the stuff of nightmares. Poisonous water moccasins were swimming in the filthy water of the flooded first floor, and snipers, rats and even a 12-foot alligator were roaming the treacherous area just outside the hospital's doors.
"To me, it was like being in hell," said Carl Warner, the chief engineer for Methodist Hospital in the hard-hit eastern part of New Orleans. "There were bodies floating in the water outside the building, and our staffers had to swim through that water to get fuel for the generator."
The patients and staff at Methodist could have been evacuated before Hurricane Katrina hit. But instead they were condemned to several days of fear and agony by bad decision-making in Louisiana and the chaotic ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of the patients died.
Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere.
...When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen.
Welcome to the United States in 2005.

Four Years
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 11 September 2005
...Bush has given us the worst of all possible worlds-- a half-finished job against al-Qaeda, an Iraqi imbroglio that could still explode into civil or even regional war-- and which serves as an al-Qaeda recruiting tool--, a government starved for funds, an enormous windfall for the rich at the expense of the middle class (which saw average wages actually fall recently), and an inability to respond effectively to a major urban catastrophe.
Four years after September 11, al-Qaeda's leadership should have been behind bars or dead. Four years after September 11, Afghanistan should have been stabilized. Four years after September 11, the government should have been ready to save lives in an urban disaster.
Bush recently started likening his poorly conceived and misnamed "war on terror" to World War II.
What his handlers have forgotten is how long World War II lasted for the United States.
Four years.
In four years, Roosevelt and allies defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In four years, Bush hasn't managed even to corner Bin Laden and a few hundred scruffy terrorists; or to extract himself from the deserts of Iraq; or to put the government's finances in good order so that it can deal with crises like Katrina.
Four years. I think about the victims of 9/11, and now 7/7 [London]. We have let you down.

Its the Christian thing to do...
Nationwide Survey Includes Data on Teenage Sex Habits
By TAMAR LEWIN
NYT, 16 September 2005
The National Center for Health Statistics released the government's most comprehensive survey of American sexual practices and reproductive health yesterday, delving for the first time into such sensitive areas as the prevalence of oral sex among teenagers and same-sex activity among adults.
Oral sex among teenagers has in recent years become a topic of rampant speculation and little solid data, apart from a 1995 Urban Institute study of adolescent boys. The new statistics confirm that study's findings that oral sex is very much part of the teenage sexual repertory. According to the survey, more than half of all teenagers aged 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex - including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse.
...The new findings on teenagers and oral sex have been of special interest to health experts.
"After years of provocative headlines and breathless stories based mostly on anecdote, we finally have some solid data," said Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "The news is probably not as bad as adults might have been led to believe, but it is likely not as good as most parents might wish."
The proportion of teenagers who have given or received oral sex was slightly higher than the proportion who have had intercourse, the survey found, with 55 percent of the boys and 54 percent of the girls having given or received oral sex, while 49 percent of the boys and 53 percent of the girls have had intercourse.
"One thing that surprised me is that we expected, based on anecdotal evidence, that girls might be more likely to give oral sex and boys more likely to receive it, but we didn't find that at all," said Dr. Jennifer Manlove, of Child Trends, which, like Ms. Brown's group, released an analysis of the data, "There's more gender equality than we expected."

14 September 2005

Chertoff Delayed Federal Response, Memo Shows
By Jonathan S. Landay, Alison Young and Shannon McCaffrey
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 13 September 2005
The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.
As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.
But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.
But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
...White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.
Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster - caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials to handle.
Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, referred most inquiries about the memo and Chertoff's actions to the Department of Homeland Security.
"There will be an after-action report" on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Perino said. She added that "Chertoff had the authority to invoke the Incident of National Significance, and he did it on Tuesday."

Responsibility means Accountability, not Cover-up
Presidential Responsibility
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 14 September 2005
Who is going to ask the president why he is taking responsibility? Every president, by definition, is responsible for what the federal government does on his watch, regardless of whether his actions specifically resulted in the consequences under discussion.
Is that what he means?
In this case, there is a growing body of evidence that he is actually responsible. As in, key failures came as direct results of decisions he made and how he managed his job. His decisions to staff critical jobs with patronage hires, his decision to politicize FEMA, his decisions about how to run DHS.
Which does he mean? How is he taking responsibility?

13 September 2005

Roberts' Bad Decision
By Stephen Gillers, David Luban and Steven Lubet
LA Times, 14 September 2005
JUST FOUR DAYS before the Bush administration named John G. Roberts Jr. to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court, the District of Columbia federal appeals court decided a case called Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. In a crucial victory for the administration, the court upheld President Bush's creation of special military tribunals for trials of alleged terrorists and denied them the protection of the Geneva Convention. Roberts was one of the judges who decided that case, but he should have recused himself.
While the case was pending in his court, Roberts was interviewing with high White House officials — including Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove — for a seat on the Supreme Court. In the words of the federal law on judicial disqualification, this placed the judge in a situation where "his impartiality might reasonably be questioned."
It is not too late to correct this error, and with Roberts slated to become the next chief justice, it is especially important that he do so.

A well balanced summary of what went wrong...
Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy
By ERIC LIPTON, CHRISTOPHER DREW, SCOTT SHANE and DAVID ROHDE
NYT, 11 September 2005
...New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was to be completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and water supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last resort," as part of a new deal with the tenants, the New Orleans Saints.
But the city's plan says that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they would be sheltered.
Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and cities to file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict standards for evacuation plans.
"There is a very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what the quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security. "There is not a lot of urgency."
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans's population left, as many as 100,000 people remained.
Colonel Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter, assuming the city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48 hours, until the storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there," recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Drivers Afraid
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began resisting.
Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses."
FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, said Natalie Rule, an agency spokeswoman, only after a request from the state that she said did not come until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor's frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.
She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of the dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation problem arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.
State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans and signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies, according to Louisiana officials.
Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans. Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.
Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the city. An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during evacuation.
"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come, people were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home managers ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep their frail patients in place and wait out the storm.
Divided Responsibilities
...The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its role, offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local governments. "Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
With Hurricane Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing with disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.
FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.

12 September 2005

The Mosquito and the Hammer
A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll, 11 September 2005
"It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers. I find it astounding that facing the truth in the month of August has been the business almost solely of these parents, pro and con. Cindy Sheehan on the one side, clearly saying that, whatever its imagined values, this war's not worth what it's costing us and it's got to end immediately; on the other side, parents, desperately trying to make some sense of the loss of their child, who want the war to continue so that he or she will not have died in vain. Both are facing a basic truth of parental grief and, I'd also say, responding to the same larger phenomenon: the war being lost. I'm not certain we'd hear from any parents if the war were being won. Given the great tragedy of losing your child to a war that's being lost, nobody gets to the question of whether it's just or not.
It's heartbreaking to me that, in American political discourse, what discussion there is of the larger human and political questions has fallen to these heartbroken parents. Where are the Democrats? Where, for that matter, are the Republicans? On the floor of Congress, has there been a discussion of this war? I mean in the Vietnam years you did have the astounding Fulbright hearings. [Democratic Senator William] Fulbright was in defiance of [Democratic President] Lyndon Johnson when those hearings were initiated, that's for sure. Where are the hearings today? We have a political system that is supposed to engage the great questions and they obviously aren't being engaged. How long will it take us to face the truth? It's just terrible that the truth has to be faced by these heartbroken parents, because even if they're opposed to the war -- as I am -- they're not the ones to whom we should look for political wisdom on how to resolve the terrible dilemma we're in."

Taking Stock of the Forever War
By MARK DANNER
NYT's Magazine, 11 September 2005
..."Declaring war on 'terror,"' as one military strategist later remarked to me, "is like declaring war on air power." It didn't matter; apocalypse, retribution, redemption were in the air, and the grandeur of the goal must be commensurate with the enormity of the crime. Within days of the attacks, President Bush had launched a "global war on terror."...Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in "ridding the world of evil." We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished - as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show - by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.

All the President's Friends
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 12 September 2005
The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.
But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?
Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.
The first example won't surprise you: the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a key role to play in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, but which has seen a major exodus of experienced officials over the past few years. In particular, senior officials have left in protest over what they say is the Bush administration's unwillingness to enforce environmental law.
Yesterday The Independent, the British newspaper, published an interview about the environmental aftermath of Katrina with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst in the agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, whom one suspects is planning to join the exodus. "The budget has been cut," he said, "and inept political hacks have been put in key positions." That sounds familiar, and given what we've learned over the last two weeks there's no reason to doubt that characterization - or to disregard his warning of an environmental cover-up in progress.
What about the Food and Drug Administration? Serious questions have been raised about the agency's coziness with drug companies, and the agency's top official in charge of women's health issues resigned over the delay in approving Plan B, the morning-after pill, accusing the agency's head of overruling the professional staff on political grounds.
Then there's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose Republican chairman hired a consultant to identify liberal bias in its programs. The consultant apparently considered any criticism of the administration a sign of liberalism, even if it came from conservatives.
You could say that these are all cases in which the Bush administration hasn't worried about degrading the quality of a government agency because it doesn't really believe in the agency's mission. But you can't say that about my other two examples. [Departments of Treasury and Homeland Security]
...The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's.

11 September 2005

Firms With White House Ties Get Katrina Contracts
FEMA taps Halliburton subsidiary, Shaw Group, Bechtel for cleanup
Reuters via CNN, 10 September 2005
Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.
One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.
Bechtel National Inc., a unit of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., has also been selected by FEMA to provide short-term housing for people displaced by the hurricane. Bush named Bechtel's CEO to his Export Council and put the former CEO of Bechtel Energy in charge of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
Experts say it has been common practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations for policy makers to take lobbying jobs once they leave office, and many of the same companies seeking contracts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.
Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion. Pentagon audits released by Democrats in June showed $1.03 billion in "questioned" costs and $422 million in "unsupported" costs for Halliburton's work in Iraq.
Watchdog groups take notice
But the web of Bush administration connections is attracting renewed attention from watchdog groups in the post-Katrina reconstruction rush. Congress has already appropriated more than $60 billion in emergency funding as a down payment on recovery efforts projected to cost well over $100 billion.
"The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight.

A Devastating Lack of Planning
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 11 September 2005
...there's one conclusion I think any fair-minded person would have to come to. And that is that in the four years to the day since 9/11, the administration appears to have done little if any effective planning for how to mobilize a national response to a catastrophic event on American soil.
And given all the history that has passed before us over these last four years, that verdict is devastating
SEE ALSO:
Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy (NYT)

10 September 2005

U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post, 10 September 2005
A federal appeals court yesterday backed the president's power to indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil without any criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.
The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former gang member and U.S. citizen arrested in Chicago in 2002 and a month later designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The government contends that Padilla trained at al Qaeda camps and was planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States. Padilla has been held without trial in a U.S. naval brig for more than three years, and his case has ignited a fierce battle over the balance between civil liberties and the government's power to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A host of civil liberties groups and former attorney general Janet Reno weighed in on Padilla's behalf, calling his detention illegal and arguing that the president does not have unchecked power to lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely.

Point Those Fingers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 9 September 2005
...Can the administration escape accountability again? Some of the tactics it has used to obscure its failure in Iraq won't be available this time. The reality of the catastrophe was right there on our TV's, although FEMA is now trying to prevent the media from showing pictures of the dead. And people who ask hard questions can't be accused of undermining the troops.
But the other factors that allowed the administration to evade responsibility for the mess in Iraq are still in place. The media will be tempted to revert to he-said-she-said stories rather than damning factual accounts. The effort to shift blame to state and local officials is under way. Smear campaigns against critics will start soon, if they haven't already. And raw political power will be used to block any independent investigation.
Will this be enough to let the administration get away with another failure? Let's hope not: if the administration isn't held accountable for what just happened, it will keep repeating its mistakes. Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff will receive presidential medals, and the next disaster will be even worse.

Top FEMA Leaders Short on Experience
By Andrew Zajac and Andrew Martin
Chicago Tribune, 7 September 2005
Top officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency have strong political connections to President Bush, but they also share at least one other trait: They had little or no experience in disaster management before landing in top FEMA posts.
Michael Brown, who heads FEMA as undersecretary of homeland security for emergency preparedness and response, already has endured sharp criticism for comments he made last week that seemed to suggest he did not understand that thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina had taken refuge at the New Orleans convention center.
Before joining FEMA in 2001, Brown, a protege of longtime Bush aide Joseph Allbaugh, was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association and had virtually no experience in disaster management.
An official biography of Brown's top aide, acting deputy director Patrick Rhode, doesn't list disaster relief experience.
The department's No. 3 official, acting deputy chief of staff Brooks Altshuler, also does not have emergency management experience, according to FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule.
Rule said the absence of direct experience managing emergencies is irrelevant because top managers need "the ability to keep the organization running."
But Eric Holdeman, director of the King County Office of Emergency Management in Seattle, said familiarity with the specifics of disaster management is essential.

Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 7 September 2005
...Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
...Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

9 September 2005

"It's dangerous to be poor in this country. It always has been."
          Michaels Cimino's film Heaven's Gate

UN Hits Back at US in Report Saying Parts of America are as Poor as Third World
By Paul Vallely
The Independent (UK), 8 September 2005
Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality.
Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare.
The document constitutes a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad in a fightback against moves by Washington to undermine next week's UN 60th anniversary conference which will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in history.
The annual Human Development Report normally concerns itself with the Third World, but the 2005 edition scrutinises inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty.
It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.
The report is bound to incense the Bush administration as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows that Washington does not care about poor black Americans. But the 370-page document is critical of American policies towards poverty abroad as well as at home. And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having "an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security".
"There is an urgent need to develop a collective security framework that goes beyond military responses to terrorism," it continues. " Poverty and social breakdown are core components of the global security threat."

Sucker's Bets for the New Century
The U.S. after Katrina
By Bill McKibben
TomDispatch, 8 September 2005
If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story -- the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.
Over and over last week, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses, and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

7 September 2005

5 September 2005

Killed by Contempt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 5 September 2005
Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.
Here's one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.
Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a "strange paralysis" set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.
What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver.
But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

A Failure of Leadership
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 5 September 2005
"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"
...Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.
...it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.