Month: July 2005

While the G-8 summit focuses on terrorism, Salon.com asks how much the FBI knew, pointing to a Newsweek article from just after the last presidential election. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the terror attacks yesterday have killed more than 50. According to the Guardian wrap-up of newspaper coverage, many are recalling how the British stood fast through the blitz in World War II and against “30 years of IRA outrages,” as the Daily Mirror put it. A leader (editorial) in the Daily Express, quoted in the Guardian wrap-up, editors wrote:

No longer can we hide behind the futile hope that our security forces had detected every cell and every would-be terrorist operating in this country. They are here and they have shown the devastation they can wreak. We are under attack as surely as our parents and grandparents were during the Blitz. The difference this time is that the bombs are being planted by fanatics who live among us… Our involvement in Iraq, too, will have made us a target for Middle East extremists but we must not forget that what we are fighting for there is democracy and freedom from tyranny. Whatever one thinks about our involvement, it does not warrant the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happened yesterday was an act of barbarity without excuse or reason.

Cheers to the Daily Express for broaching the topic of British involvement in Iraq as a contributing factor, but it points to, to borrow the name of a Star Trek episode, a “Terror Within,” to which the Daily Mail reacts, “Make no mistake, Britain will almost certainly have to sacrifice some of our ancient legal rights if we wish to protect our citizens. Civil liberties mean very little to someone killed by shrapnel…”

Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst have published an essay in the International Herald Tribune on the dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism in religion. Neither gets it right, they argue.

Middle East Realities, in an e-mail newsletter, is comparing the present situation in Egypt to 1952, when “[t]he Egyptian Revolution that overthrew the King, put a group of military leaders in power — with Gamel Abdel Nasser to emerge not only as Egypt’s leader but as the leader of the much of the Arab world.” The newsletter reprints a Washington Post story, which reads in part:

“Egyptian society is boiling. We have seen this only one or two times in the past 80 years,” said Alaa Aswani, an author and dentist who is active in two other new groups: Writers for Change and Doctors for Change…. The wave of protests is largely limited to the middle class, and it remains an open question whether Egypt’s legions of working-class people and unemployed will eventually join. But in a country whose opposition was long politically dormant, the spread of opposition activity is nonetheless striking, activists contend.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Zarqawi group, affiliated with al Qaeda, claimed it has killed an Egyptian diplomat, “five days after gunmen seized him on a Baghdad street where he had gone unguarded to buy a newspaper,” in what “would be the most serious blow yet in efforts by Islamic militant groups participating in the insurgency in Iraq to intimidate other countries in the Arab world that have been moving towards fuller ties with Iraq since a transitional government with an electoral mandate took office two months ago.” I’m thinking however that this is also likely an attempt to exploit any unrest in Egypt.

Should a hostile regime come to power in Egypt, Israel would likely reconsider its security situation. This is not only unlikely to further the Israeli-Palestinian peace process–which hardliners on both sides oppose anyway–but would remove what the United States considers a “moderate” nation from its geopolitical calculations.

Initial reports of several blasts in the London Underground blamed “power surges,” but Tony Blair is now blaming terrorists. There were three blasts hitting trains, and a fourth on a double decker bus. Blair will be returning to London from the G8 summit at the Gleneagles in Scotland, which had just begun. “Scotland Yard officially confirmed that at least 37 people were killed and there were 700 casualties, 300 of whom were taken to hospital by ambulance.” Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility.

Robert H. Frank, an economist at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, addresses the Bush administration notion that tax cuts for the wealthy will stimulate the economy in the New York Times. He writes that “the president’s claim that tax cuts to the owners of small businesses will stimulate them to hire more workers flies in the face of bedrock principles outlined in every introductory economics textbook” and that “inducing the wealthy to spend more on consumption” means spending on imports, not helping domestic employment. It would have been nice if he’d written this earlier.

We still don’t know. According to Capitol Hill Blue, “The Bush Administration is scrambling behind the scenes to stop a criminal indictment against Presidential advisor Karl Rove for disclosing classified information to reporters in an attempt to discredit a White House critic.” But according to Salon.com’s War Room, “MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell has been selling his own story hard at the Huffington Post, and in the process he’s gotten a little ahead of himself. Over the weekend, he said that Newsweek was working on an “It’s Rove!” story and would “probably break it” Sunday. What Newsweek actually reported Sunday was a little less than all that: Newsweek said that email messages Time turned over to the federal prosecutor handling the Plame investigation reveal that Rove was one of Matthew Cooper’s sources as he worked on a Plame story, but that it’s unclear what Rove told Cooper.” Capitol Hill Blue says, “Emails recently turned over to a federal grand jury investigating the leak show Cooper told his editors that Rove was the source of the information. In addition, Rove attorney Karl Luskin confirms that Cooper interviewed Rove for the article but claims that his client ‘never knowingly disclosed classified information.'”

O’Donnell focuses on the word, “knowingly,” taking this as an admission that Rove was indeed the source of the leak. Where Salon.com sees Rove as one source in the story, Capitol Hill Blue seems to take the absence of other named names as sources as evidence that Rove was the source of the leak. But they say more:

Bill Israel, a former reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Massachusetts and who taught with Rove at the University at Texas, says Rove could have easily set up the Plame affair.

“Rove once described himself as a die-hard Nixonite; he is, like the former president, both student and master of plausible deniability,” Israel says. “Consequently, when former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson challenged President Bush’s embrace of the British notion that Saddam Hussein imported uranium from Niger to produce nuclear weapons, retaliation by Rove was never in doubt.”

So I’m guessing it was Rove, but he’ll dodge prosecution.

The Columbia Journalism Review has weighed in against the Supreme Court’s refusal to protect the identity of the source who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA station chief in reprisal for her husband’s criticism of Bush administration claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Niger. “‘Who am I to defy the courts,’ [Norman Pearlstine, the lawyer who serves as Time Inc.’s editor-in-chief] asked himself and others, when even Truman and Nixon bowed to judicial edicts? But that’s an argument based on a false equivalence,” says the Review, essentially arguing that no constitutional crisis results from an editor’s refusal to reveal the sources.

I remain struck, however, by Jim Naureckas’ comments on Democracy Now!, in which he pointed out a couple things:

1. “I think the cult of secrecy around the C.I.A. is absurd as it goes back 30 years to the case of the C.I.A. station chief in Athens, his name being revealed, and then him being killed I think six or seven days later, assassinated six or seven days later. I think he was — his name appeared in a newsletter, a sort of a left wing anti-C.I.A. newsletter. And the response at that time was, ‘Ah, this proves that if you name agents, they’re going to be killed, or they’re going to be compromised,’ and so on and so forth. Except that everybody who wanted to know who the C.I.A. station chief in Athens already knew who it was. So I never bought that. It’s the job of the C.I.A. station chief in a given city, foreign city, to be known, so that they can be approached by other agents and by people who want to leak them information.”
2. “I think it’s important to distinguish between leaks from the government and plants by the government. These are two different kinds of animals. It’s one thing for a whistleblower to reveal government wrongdoing, and that kind of action, you know, I think is heroic and needs to be protected. And there needs to be stronger protection for journalists who don’t want to reveal that kind of source. On the other hand, the vast majority of anonymous sources that you see in mainstream media are not whistleblowers. They’re government operatives. They’re people who are working anonymously for the government in order to get out the government’s agenda.”

In the context that the source of the leak might be White House media manipulator Karl Rove, Naureckas’ second comment seems particularly relevant. Naureckas argues that the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent did not expose government wrongdoing, but was instead itself an act of wrongdoing, not only violating the law and arguably placing Plame’s life at risk, but being an act of retaliation against her husband’s criticism of Bush administration claims.

It’s easy, I think, to get one’s head twisted on this issue. And this is a case where Naureckas, of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, may very well have it right. Karl Rove–or whoever leaked Valerie Plame’s identity–is no whistleblower and should not be mistaken for one.

As patriotic Americans prepare to attend fireworks displays tonight, often in local parks, I cannot help but contemplate the discrepancy between these “harmless” displays and the real fireworks overseas. According to the Brookings Institute, as of 28 June, over 1700 Americans–patriotic Americans–had died, and over 13,000 had been wounded, not for democracy or “American values” but for a lie. Nearly 2500 Iraqi police and military have died for American hegemony. And very conservatively, 20,000-30,000 Iraqi civilians have been fatally caught in fireworks.

But children will light sparklers and set off firecrackers. Grown-ups will revel in a reaffirmation of propaganda. Flags will fly everywhere. And my stomach will be further tested.

I’m sitting in Palo Alto, watching the goings on on a Sunday evening in the middle of a three day weekend. In the time I’ve spent here, I’ve been noticing more and more homeless in this relatively well-off community. They congregate at a couple churches on Hamilton that offer refuge. Here on Emerson, there is one old man wearing a blue sweatshirt proclaiming that he has driven the Alaska Highway, and black sweatpants. He is forever tugging up and at the waist on his sweatpants. Mentally ill, he limps up and down the block, involuntarily making a spectacle of himself.

At school, this is my quarter to finish up general education requirements. Among the classes I’m taking is US History from 1877. So far it has largely been about the rise of corporate power, something Charles Reich also wrote of in his book, The Greening of America. The professor says a recurring theme will be a contest between the ideas of trickle-down and what I’ll term a “rising tide.” Trickle-down, of course, is the notion that by helping the rich, they will invest more, creating jobs and thus opportunity for the poor. Others respond that this has never worked and that it is better to assist the poor, for as the old saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” It is a contest between those who blame the poor for their moral failings and those who criticize the rich for their arrogance; where corporations regard workers as expendable, even a hard worker can face misfortune.

Here on the streets of a well off suburb, I see the effects. A pair of girls giggle and point; they cross the street to avoid the man tugging on his black sweatpants. I am reminded of how the conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, then-governor of California, closed the mental institutions, turning these people loose upon the streets. The conservative morality makes no allowance for sickness or misfortune. Each person’s fate is in his own hands; all have opportunity, and any failure to overcome circumstances is a moral failure.

Over an hour has passed since I began to write this entry. The man in the blue sweatshirt and the black sweatpants walks past me again. A couple approaches from the other direction; he says something unintelligible and they avoid eye contact–she looks to me for visual relief. Morality indeed.

It is the moment we’ve been dreading — an opening on the Supreme Court, and an opportunity for Bush to push the Court further to the right. Sandra Day O’Connor, whom Phyllis Schlafly described as “a terrible disappointment,” has announced her retirement. Where the widely anticipated retirement of Chief Justice Rehnquist would allow Bush to replace a conservative with another conservative, O’Connor’s departure presents conservatives with an opportunity they’ve waited a decade for, and now, they’re squabbling. The New York Times is carrying a story on conservative opposition to a potential nomination of Alberto Gonzales, who recently survived unexpectedly tough opposition in his confirmation process for the position of Attorney General, but represents an unknown quantity in conservative litmus tests.

“Whatever else you say about President Bush, he is certainly the type of man who says what he means and means what he says,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group. “I also think it’s clear that the majority who elected him – and who elected 55 members of the Senate – is looking to him to fulfill that pledge. Just as President Clinton took the opportunity to name two very liberal judges, the president’s constituency will be looking to him to appoint a conservative jurist.”

It is a little too trite to say the stakes are huge. “Members of Congress and conservatives close to the White House said that they were confident that Mr. Bush would use the first Supreme Court vacancy of his tenure to nominate a judge in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as he has repeatedly promised to do.” Judges are appointed for life, and “[e]ven at a time when they have unprecedented influence in the nation’s capital, many conservative leaders have become increasingly restive at their comparative lack of sway on the court and have described the selection of the next justice as the most important decision Mr. Bush will make – even if he has to force it through at the expense of his ambitious second-term agenda.”

The Washington Times focuses on those conservatives see as the barbarians on the gate, however, citing Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood, saying the organization “has alerted 1 million of its supporters, trained 50,000 local leaders and mobilized more than 170 campus groups to rally against any Supreme Court nominee deemed weak on supporting reproductive rights.”

It will all land in the Senate Judiciary Committee, once again focusing attention on its chairman, Arlen Specter, who has “suggested that the Senate would have difficulty confirming judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade,” and whom the New York Times describes as “[a] rare centrist in a Senate that has shifted increasingly to the right[;] he is reviled by conservatives for dooming the nomination of Robert H. Bork, and by liberals for assuring the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas with his aggressive questioning of Anita Hill, the law professor who had accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment.”