For 2006...

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions and "reflecting" on the prior year, but I do think it's been a pretty interesting year, and I think 2006 should be even more interesting. Between the continuing trials and tribulations of the Bush administration, the ever-evolving situation in Iraq and various other political shenanigans, we here at TWM should have plenty to do this coming year. Happy New Year's to everyone, and visit us often!

DeLay's Treachery

When a member of Congress sells his services to Russian energy interests in exchange for a huge contribution to his PAC it's treason, plain and simple.

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

About politics in Washington, I'm as cynical as they come. But this is absolutely incredible. It's one thing for members of Congress to sell themselves to American corporations, or the American wealthy. But it's quite another for Tom DeLay to sell himself via his PAC to the Russians. It's no crime for an American citizen to represent foreign interests in Washington. It happens all of the time. But for a member of Congress, a man beholden not only to his constituents but to all Americans, to in secret take political contributions from foreign interests in exchange for his labor on Capitol Hill is a heinous and despicable act, and a betrayal of our country. DeLay may somehow beat the rap in Texas, but his spider web of connections to Abramoff are such that his career in politics is over. And if there's any justice in the world, DeLay will spend time in prison for this and other countless lies and betrayals.

The second space race

China is looking to land a man on the moon by 2020, Japan by 2025, and America by 2018. I guess depending on how you look at it, we'll have beaten the Chinese by 50 years or 2. Either way, it has been 33 (nearly 34) years since we last landed on the moon, and that's just too dang long. This is one of those ventures where the symbolic importance is disproportionate to the practical effects. After all, China won't be doing anything anyone hasn't done before. What's precisely important is they will be doing what only we (the US) has done before. The Chinese want recognition as a modern superpower, and evidently they're willing to pay the price to get it. We want to prove that we're still technologically superior. The question is if we're willing to pay the price to be technologically superior.

As far as long-term plans, I don't know what the implications are for sure, but given that we're seeing growth in the private space industry sector, it may be that whoever gets there first gets to stake a claim for commercial interests.

N. Korea uses slave labor

Ok, whatever problems you might have with the USA, at least we don't treat our citizens like these women, who are basically leased out to Czech employers. The women's entire paycheck is deposited in an account that goes to the N. Korean government, of which they are given a tiny stipend. They live in barracks controlled by N. Korean minders and are not allowed to go anywhere besides home and work. If there's any country in the world that just needs to be conquered, it's N. Korea.

Vietnam and Iraq

Between pundits who tell us there are no similarities between Vietnam and Iraq and pundits who tell us they couldn't be more alike, it's hard to know what we learned in Vietnam that's applicable to the conflict in Iraq today. Dale Andrade, a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History writes in the Washington Post today about some of the lessons of Vietnam. First of all, he tells us why current enthusiasm over "clear and hold" in some circles is unwarranted:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice invoked it during Senate testimony in October, and columnist David Ignatius reported in his Nov. 4 op-ed that many Army officers are reading historian Lewis Sorley's book "A Better War," which argues that the United States could have prevailed in Vietnam if the military had used Gen. Creighton Abrams's ideas earlier in the war. This simplistic notion may resonate in Washington, but it means little to troops on the ground. Marines in Fallujah or soldiers in Baghdad or near the Syrian border will tell you that they have been "clearing" areas for more than a year now, but "holding" them is a different matter. That takes a lot of troops, not small teams.

Troops which we don't have, of course. There's no doubt that our soldiers are more than capable of routing the insurgents in any significant fight in any city in Iraq; witness Fallujah parts I and II, Ramadi, Samarra, and so on. The problem is that almost the very moment troubled is quelled in one spot, it arises in another, and troops end up leaving the city for the most part to Iraqi security forces which have so far proven inadequate. However, Andrade says there are things we did right in Vietnam which can be applied to Iraq or any counter-insurgency effort. His examples are worth quoting at length:

First, there must be a unified structure that combines military and civilian pacification efforts. In Vietnam that organization was called CORDS, for Civil Operations and Rural Development Support. Formed in 1967, it placed the disjointed and ineffective civilian pacification programs under the military.

In Afghanistan, the provincial reconstruction teams have viewed CORDS as a model, but there is no truly integrated system yet. In Iraq, the old Coalition Provisional Authority suffered from the same problems that caused the formation of CORDS, in particular a dual chain of command that failed to coordinate military and civilian efforts. Not enough has been done since the CPA's dissolution in 2004 to integrate nation-building into military planning.

In many ways the CPA was an utter failure, and this is one of them. The CPA and the military frequently operated as two separate entities merely co-existing in the same country. And nation-building was never properly studied before the invasion or implemented after the invasion by either military or civilian authorities. Even now, as our armed forces enter their fourth year of operations in Afghanistan and third year in Iraq, one would be hard pressed to find any serious focus on nation building in the military. Nor is it a term anyone in the Bush administration will utter; when the focus is on how to get out of Iraq, it's hardly surprising that no one's putting any serious study into how to rebuild broken or failed states.

The second lesson involves attacking the enemy's center of gravity. An insurgency thrives only if it can maintain a permanent presence among the population, which in Vietnam was called the Viet Cong infrastructure, or VCI. This covert presence used carrot and stick -- promises of reform and threats of violence -- to take control of large chunks of the countryside. U.S. planners were aware of VCI, but until 1968 only the CIA paid it much attention. Under CORDS, however, the United States implemented the much-maligned Phoenix program, which targeted VCI and resulted in the capture or killing (mostly capture) of more than 80,000 VCI guerrillas. Criticisms of Phoenix abound, and there were many problems with the system, but the fact is that a counterinsurgency plan that ignores the guerrilla infrastructure is no plan at all.

The Phoenix program is maligned for good reason. It was largely aimed at capturing or assassinating Viet Cong leaders and due largely to faulty or inadequate intelligence, efforts to meet quotas and general abuse it resulted in the mistaken killing of thousands of civilian Vietnamese who were not members of the Viet Cong. Opinions differ on to what extent the program was a failure or a success, and certainly the assassination of innocent Iraqis will by no means bring the insurgency to an end. But Andrade is right to say that adequate intelligence, followed by a campaign which aims to subvert the recruitment of insurgents, should be a goal of the U.S. military and Iraqi forces. Unfortunately such intelligence is lacking, and there's no sign that our military is or will become any better at acquiring it.

Finally, it is crucial to form militias in order to raise the staff necessary to maintain a permanent government presence in dangerous areas. This is the only way "clear and hold" has any hope of working. Even an eventual U.S. troop strength of more than 500,000 and a similar number of South Vietnamese soldiers were not enough to take the countryside from the insurgents. But the early creation of a territorial militia helped return a government presence to the countryside. These militia members were recruited in villages and paid by the government; they lived in the areas where they operated, making it more difficult for the Viet Cong to settle among the population. Their numbers also reached 500,000, thanks partly to early participation by U.S. advisers. Although the militia's performance was sometimes lacking, overall it was an important part of the pacification
program.

In Afghanistan and Iraq the lack of government-controlled militias is a serious weakness, and the United States has not pushed for their formation. Militias exist in both countries, but they are often loyal to warlords (Afghanistan) or under the command of various ethnic or religious groups (Iraq). Their allegiance to the government is questionable.

Of course there are militias in Iraq. But they're not the kind that Andrade envisions. Rather then being home-grown security patrols, these militias are large, well-armed groups of young men loyal to their various sects, factions or leaders, such as the Badr Brigade or the Mahdi Army or the Kurdish Peshmerga. The forces at play in Iraq include these militias, Iraqi security forces (frequently infiltrated by the militias), the insurgents, and U.S. and coalition forces. I am not aware of any large scale effort to arm the Iraqis so that they can protect themselves from insurgent infiltration. Nor is it likely that such a program would suceed. The South Vietnamese government competed with the Viet Cong for the loyalty of its citizens. In Iraq, most Iraqis are already loyal to one faction or another, or prefer to stay out of the way. It's not likely the Iraqi government could hope to create local militias capable of defending themselves against insurgent and jihadist attacks in such conditions.

Andrade himself doesn't sound entirely convinced that his lessons, as applied to Iraq, will produce a pacified Iraq anytime soon. But there's a larger point to be made. Despite the ultimate failure in Vietnam, we learned crucial lessons in how to battle an insurgency, and those lessons are for the most part being ignored today. In this instance, ignorance of our own recent history may doom us to repeat the loss in Vietnam.

Texas Conservatives Oppose Gay Center at UT

Apparently Texas conservatives are not content with merely outlawing gay marriage in Texas. Now they're attacking a student funded center at UT offers services to gay, lesbian and female students:

Now some Texas conservatives are targeting the Gender and Sexuality Center, saying UT students shouldn't have to pay $80,000 a year in fees for a center that "promotes a lifestyle" a majority of Texans reject – particularly when parents are struggling to afford college costs.

"They're obviously trying to promote an agenda on one side of the political spectrum," said Will Lutz, a columnist who wrote a scathing piece on the center for the socially conservative Texans for Texas group. "What we've created is a government-funded advocacy group for values a lot of Texans don't agree with."

The "agenda" that the likes of Lutz is opposed to is acceptance of gays. It's not good enough to conservatives like Lutz that gays can't marry. That a center at UT should offer services to gay students, paid for by all UT students, is unacceptable. That the UT students themselves approved of such a center is irrelevant to likes of Lutz and his ilk.

Defenders also include some lawmakers and students on both sides of the aisle who believe the students' decision to approve the center should be respected.

"The students should decide. That's really what's at stake here. It's not an issue of morality," said Brian Haley, a law student who was president of UT's student government when it allowed the center to use a small space in the Student Services Building.

"I'm not disagreeing with them on a moral basis," said Mr. Haley, a self-described conservative Republican. "But these processes were set up for students to decide, and I think our regents would support our students."

Of course it's absurd to say that the center should be funded solely by private donations. Students at all colleges fund programs that they may or may not agree with. If they don't like what their college funds, then they can elect to go elsewhere. Of course the real point is not to prevent the center from getting student funding; these conservatives would be happy to put the center out of business period. That gay students would have nowhere to turn for services as a result doesn't bother them at all.

Bush's "New" Approach

The Bush team, seeking to save Bush's presidency, have drafted a new approach to the second term:

President Bush shifted his rhetoric on Iraq in recent weeks after an intense debate among advisers about how to pull out of his political free fall, with senior adviser Karl Rove urging a campaign-style attack on critics while younger aides pushed for more candor about setbacks in the war, according to Republican strategists.

The Iraq push culminated the rockiest political year of this presidency, which included the demise of signature domestic priorities, the indictment of the vice president's top aide, the collapse of a Supreme Court nomination, a fumbled response to a natural disaster and a rising death toll in an increasingly unpopular war. It was not until Bush opened a fresh campaign to reassure the public on Iraq that he regained some traction.

The lessons drawn by a variety of Bush advisers inside and outside the White House as they map a road to recovery in 2006 include these: Overarching initiatives such as restructuring Social Security are unworkable in a time of war. The public wants a balanced appraisal of what is happening on the battlefield as well as pledges of victory. And Iraq trumps all.

"I don't think they realized that Iraq is the totality of their legacy until fairly recently," said former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.), an outside adviser to the White House. "There is not much of a market for other issues."

You have to wonder why it took them until a year into the second term to figure out that Iraq is the legacy of Bush's presidency. Considering Bush ran his campaign around national security and the war on terror, of which he himself stated the Iraq war was the center-piece, you would think he or his advisors would realize they had limited the potential of their second term.

What was is this new approach?

That proved a galvanizing moment at the White House, according to a wide range of GOP strategists in and out of the administration. Rove, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House strategic planning director Peter H. Wehner urged the president to dust off the 2004 election strategy and fight back, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. White House counselor Dan Bartlett and communications director Nicolle Wallace, however, counseled a more textured approach. The same-old Bush was not enough, they said; he needed to be more detailed about his strategy in Iraq and, most of all, more open in admitting mistakes -- something that does not come easily to Bush.

"Admitting mistakes" of course has amounted to little more then acknowledging that there were mistakes made, such as with the handling in Iraq or the Katrina recovery. What is the strategy in Iraq?

Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University specialist on wartime public opinion who now works at the White House, helped draft a 35-page public plan for victory in Iraq, a paper principally designed to prove that Bush had one.

Bush's new approach is really the same as the old approach: politics over substance. Instead of admitting error as the first step in correcting error, Bush merely admits error to show that he's willing to admit error. Instead of crafting a wartime plan in Iraq in an effort to give direction to the mission there, he employs a public opinion specialist to create a plan to show that he has a plan. To me then, it seems that nothing much has changed at all.

NSA Spying Update

Again I'm a little slow on this thanks to the holidays, but here's some more on the NSA domestic surveillance issue. President Bush's decision to circumvent the FISA court may have had something to do with the court's willingness to modify wire-tap requests submitted by his administration:

Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

To win a court-approved wiretap, the government must show "probable cause" that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that "may" involve a violation of criminal law.

Faced with that standard, Bamford said, the Bush administration had difficulty obtaining FISA court-approved wiretaps on dozens of people within the United States who were communicating with targeted al-Qaida suspects inside the United States.

The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004 -- the most recent years for which public records are available.

Additionally, the revelation of the surveillance program is having an effect on the prosecutions of terrorists, terrorist would-bes or sympathizers:

Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets.

David B. Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Faris, said he planned to file a motion in part to determine whether information about the surveillance program should have been turned over. Lawyers said they were also considering a civil case against the president, saying that Mr. Faris was the target of an illegal wiretap ordered by Mr. Bush. A lawyer for Mr. Babar declined to comment.

Defense lawyers in several other high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including the so-called Portland Seven and Lackawanna Six cases, said they were also planning to file legal challenges or were reviewing their options.

It's unclear what success these defense lawyers may have in challenging the prosecutions based on the discovery of this program. Certainly NSA surveillance was not involved in all of these cases, but the possibility that it was involved in any of them raises doubts as to the legality of the prosecutions. Like the Gitmo detentions, this is yet another example of how circumventing the law can ultimately have a negative effect on our efforts against terrorism.

This system is broke!

(Thanks to Xanthippas and Adam for showing me the articles)

We were discussing this story a couple of days ago, so I thought it would be worth putting on here. Most people probably don't know how military budgeting really works, but I'm sure no one will be surprised to hear that it's a very political process. On the one hand, you have the Navy, Air Force, and Army (the Marines are part of the Navy) trying to get as much as possible out of the government. Now as all of us know who've ever tried to do it, getting money out of the government is never an easy task. The federal government doesn't just open a big checkbook and say, "How much you need?" No, no. There has to be a strategy for it.

The government has to see tangible results. But not only tangible results, they need big, tangible results that anyone can look at and see without reading hundred-page reports. So instead of asking for $40 billion for say, 1 million sailors with clothes, gear, and training, they ask for $60 billion for a few carriers, destroyers, and all the men to run them with associated gear and training. That's not the only side of it, either. Powerful senators who oversee these appropriations have an interest in big-ticket items as well. That's because a $40 billion ship contract benefits a senator's home state a heck of a lot more than 1 million sailors scattered all over America and the globe. So he definitely has a vested interest in funding huge projects that help his constituents or political allies.

Now, you say, "Well, why don't we just fund all of them at the maximum they need?" Well, that's a good question. The thing is, the services have an agreement as to what percentage of budget money they get. That's because in the old days they squabbled over who got how much and none of them ended up getting as much as they wanted. So they came to an agreement: Army 30%, Navy and Air Force 35% (this was in the days when we thought conventional wars requiring huge ground forces were over and anything but small wars would result in nukes being brought out).

Currently, we have a big problem. I'm sure everyone remembers the news about soldier shortages in Iraq, lack of armor for transports and Humvees, and inadequate body armor for National Guardsmen and all that. Well, if we funded the Army at 100% of what it would have needed to fight this war, we'd have to put in probably around an extra $400 billion for the Air Force and Navy because otherwise the Army wouldn't get the money.

Fred Kaplan makes it clear that this is the norm and even the Iraq war can't shake the system, so established it has become:

Nearly all the big-ticket items belong to the Air Force and the Navy. These services aren't experiencing much of a manpower crunch. (Few pilots or sea crews are being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan now.) And, because of the budget-divvying accord, they can't be called on to slash their planes, ships, or submarines to keep the Army flush with soldiers.
Don't expect Congress to break this logjam. Last week, the House and Senate appropriations committees finished their conference on the Fiscal Year 2006 defense bill—and didn't cut back on a single high-profile weapons system.

He also makes a suggestion I find very sensible:

Are all of these weapons so urgently needed that a few couldn't be delayed
a few years (note: not killed, just delayed)? The stealth planes in particular—no
other country will pose a threat to U.S. combat aircraft for at least a decade.
Is there any reason, besides bureaucratic politics, why, say, half the F/A-22s
couldn't be deferred and the $1.6 billion in savings sent over to the Army or
the Marines? How about Bush's much-cherished, but utterly unworkable, missile-defense program
(fully funded by Congress at $8.8 billion): What would be wrong with
transferring, say, $5 billion of that sum to buy extra armor for the troops or
fund more tangible homeland
security efforts?

But of course, we can't expect our government to start making sense now! Seriously, people, if you love your country, please write your congressmen, the President, and maybe even your school principle to do something about this situation. We have people over there in Iraq. We're going to have people over there for a long time. The Seawolf (a multibillion dollar stealth submarine) will not save a single life. The F-22 is great, but we're not bombing the Iraqis anymore. The cost of just one of those could hire, train, and equip hundreds of men (properly equip, even). Let me link you a story about people who weren't properly equipped, and paid the price for it.

A Mission That Ended in Inferno for 3 Women

The end of Monday Night Football

Well, yesterday was the last time that Monday Night Football was to be aired on ABC, a broadcast network. It has now formally moved to ESPN, although both companies are owned by Disney. ESPN, with its two revenue streams is able to pay the price the NFL asked for MNF and still turn a profit, whereas ABC loses money every year on football. On the one hand, we can see this as no more than the natural evolution of the marketplace. The age of broadcast dominance is over; we can probably predict a time when broadcast goes the way of the dinosaur except for local networks and PBS. Still, there are a lot of households out there without cable, and not all cable-equipped homes get ESPN. This automatically cuts out 17 million viewers.

As silly as it may seem, this is one of the few cultural institutions that America has as a nation that is universal regardless of sub-culture, race, ethnicity, age, sex or anything else. That's not to say that it has equal demographics in all categories, but MNF is more egalitarian than regular Sunday football. It's a sad loss; it would be a lot like us giving up a national holiday and only having devotees of a particular religion celebrate it. I mean, take both Christmas and Easter. Lots of people don't celebrate those as religious holidays, they celebrate them secularly. There's nothing wrong with that, it brings us all closer together and gives us all shared experiences, something Americans are particularly lacking in. I believe Monday Night Football had the same effect, and that as a cable program it no longer will. Sure, in the grand scheme of things it's not like losing a family member, but the things that give us good memories are important too, and MNF was one of those things.

The NSA Spied on U.N. Diplomats Prior to Iraq War (or, Why Bush Should Be Impeached)

Linked above is an article about how the administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of Iraq to help the White House gain leverage, by any means possible, for a resolution from the U.N. Security Council authorizing the war. Now I'm certain somewhere in the archives I've mentioned this before (fellow blogger Xanthippas recently informed me that I had two years ago predicted scooter Libby was behind the Valerie Plame leak!), but obviously this is a much more mainstream story now, as Congressional leaders are calling for an investigation into the NSA's expanded domestic spying powers ordered by President Bush.

Xanthippas has done a good job of gathering many of the details of this developing story, and I won't rehash what Normon Solomon does a good job of explaining in the article. However, I will say that I fully believe that with what we have seen that should Democrats regain control of Congress articles of impeachment should be drawn up and President Bush be put on trial. I really don't see how this is not a blatant abuse of power that spits on our Constitution in the league of Nixon, and definitely worse than Clinton, not even to be partisan about it. What must Bush do to deserve at least censure? Sometimes I feel as if anything short of a ridiculous crime such as child murder would not suffice in the Congress' and media's eyes. But I digress.

So there you have it. One of the wise men endorses Bush's impeachment. Something tells me I will not be the last one to do so, either in the blogging arena or outside...

Are We More Secure Since 9/11?

A report compiled by 13 Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee analyzing public statements and congressional testimony on Bush administration security goals since 2002 states that the Homeland Security Department has failed to fulfill 33 of its own pledges to better protect the nation. The report concludes that gaps remain in federal efforts to secure an array of areas, including ports, borders and chemical plants. There also are still delays in the department's sharing terror alerts and other intelligence with state and local officials, the review said. Among these failures:

_Compile a single, comprehensive list prioritizing protections for the nation's most critical and potentially vulnerable buildings, transportation systems and other infrastructure.
_Install monitors at borders and every international seaport and airport to screen for radiation material entering the country.
_Install surveillance cameras at all high-risk chemical plants.
_Create one effective network to share quickly security-related intelligence and alerts with state, local and private industry officials.
_Track foreign visitors through a computerized system that takes their fingerprints and photographs as they enter and exit the country

Now the effectiveness of the HSD, which consolidated 22 federal agencies (except for the FBI and CIA whose lack of a good working relationship is considered to be one of the biggest problems that lead to 9/11), has always been suspect, especially when the 9/11 commission reported the need for a national intelligence director and that many of its previous recommendations had not been put into place. Many others have contended that our ports are not secure, nuclear power and chemical plants not guarded, etc. Now it would be easy for me to be partisan and cynical and say that the Homeland Security Department has accomplished nothing and that the Bush adminstration has done nothing. I will not make such a claim. But I think much has not been done, and that the administration's and the Republican Congress' efforts in fighting terrorism have been too drawn toward military action (obviously) and increasing the ability to gather people's personal information (again, obviously) and not enough towards towards well, basic homeland security protections.

The Cost of PTSD

A debate has arisen over the cost of the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder among our veterans:

In the past five years, the number of veterans receiving compensation for the disorder commonly called PTSD has grown nearly seven times as fast as the number receiving benefits for disabilities in general, according to a report this year by the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs. A total of 215,871 veterans received PTSD benefit payments last year at a cost of $4.3 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 1999 -- a jump of more than 150 percent.

Experts say the sharp increase does not begin to factor in the potential impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because the increase is largely the result of Vietnam War vets seeking treatment decades after their combat experiences. Facing a budget crunch, experts within and outside the Veterans Affairs Department are raising concerns about fraudulent claims, wondering whether the structure of government benefits discourages healing, and even questioning the utility and objectivity of the diagnosis itself.

One can only imagine how the cost will increase when more and more veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars begin seeking treatment for PTSD. But as the costs increase, some conservatives begin to question the validity of PTSD and the integrity of veterans claiming to suffer from it:

Psychiatrist Sally Satel, who is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said an underground network advises veterans where to go for the best chance of being declared disabled. The institute organized a recent meeting to discuss PTSD among veterans.

"We have young men and women coming back from Iraq who are having PTSD and getting the message that this is a disorder they can't be treated for, and they will have to be on disability for the rest of their lives," said Frueh, a professor of public psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. "My concern about the policies is that they create perverse incentives to stay ill. It is very tough to get better when you are trying to demonstrate how ill you are."

However, it's important to note that for every veteran who receives compensation from the VA for PTSD, countless more refuse to seek treatment and so suffer in silence:

A far bigger problem is the many veterans who seek help but do not get it or who never seek help, a number of experts said. Studies have shown that large numbers of veterans with PTSD never seek treatment, possibly because of the stigma surrounding mental illness.

In other words, the increasing costs-even factoring in those veterans who make false claims-almost certainly doesn't represent the costs we would face if all the veterans who suffered from PTSD received the treatment they deserve.

So far Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration have shown their willingness to cut benefits as the costs of taking care of the veterans of our recent wars begin to rise. Certainly this will be no different. Conservative commentators and scholars at think tanks will claim that PTSD is over-diagnosed, or that a significant number of veterans are making fraudulant claims, or they will argue that the condition isn't as serious and doesn't require lengthy treatment. They will do so in an effort to reduce the cost of providing for our veterans, as part of the larger effort to cut the deficit or avoid any cost that would threaten tax cuts. But to me it's simple. Treating veterans for what happens to them in the wars we send them to is part of the cost of going to war. We pay it because we sent them, and our government shouldn't be allowed to cheat itself into war "on the cheap" by thinking that it can get out of paying for the veterans that suffer the consequences of the wars they are sent into.

More on Domestic Surveillance

Thanks to the holidays I'm a little late with this. But this article on the Dec. 24th NY Times confirms some earlier suspicions about the exact extent of the NSA domestic surveillance program:

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

It would seem then that in addition to eavesdropping on specific communications, the NSA has been looking at patterns in communications traffic. This is of course a far more extensive operation then it would appear Bush was admitting to when the news of the program was first revealed. I suppose whether you think Bush was lying by ommission in his radio address by failing to disclose this program depends on what your definition of "eavesdrop" is. At the same time though, you can be assured that we don't know all there is to know about this program.

A little more space development

KENT, Wash. - Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos expects a rocket-ship complex
for his aerospace venture Blue Origin to open early next year.

[...]Blue Origin has released few details about the project. But a Texas newspaper editor who interviewed Bezos earlier this year said the billionaire talked sending a spaceship into orbit that launches and lands vertically, like a rocket, and eventually building spaceships that can orbit the Earth — possibly leading to permanent colonies in space.

It sounds pretty ambitous, but of course one must be skeptical. I mean, that sounds like something Popular Science was talking about 30 years ago. However, there are signs that this guy is pretty ambitious.

Bezos paid $13 million for nearly 25 acres of industrial land, where city records indicate he's spending up to $8 million to remodel an office building and warehouse. Plans also call for construction of an experimental stand where rocket engines will be tested in three-minute-long trial runs.

Test launches will be conducted in West Texas, where Bezos recently bought a 165,000-acre ranch near the small town of Van Horn, about 110 miles southeast of El Paso. Long-term plans for that site include a spaceport where three-person space-tourism flights could blast off once a week.

So he's obviously putting real money into this and plans to do something big (speaking of which, if acres don't mean anything to you, that's about 258 sq. miles). As for their earlier comment about space colonization, that does seem to be the eventual aim of Bezos in comments given by him at different times.

The only interview Bezos has granted about his space plans was with Larry Simpson, the editor of the weekly Van Horn Advocate.

"He told me their first spacecraft is going to carry three people up to the edge of space and back. But ultimately, his thing is space colonization," Simpson told The Associated Press in March.

In 1982, during the valedictory speech he gave at his high-school graduation, Bezos stressed the need for space colonization. "I'm not sure this is a hobby for him," Logsdon said. "I think this is his next big idea."

So yes, it seems to be for real, people. As new and undeveloped as this might be, here's a guy who seems to be working on space colonization. It will probably take many years to develop his project though, so his may not bear as much fruit immediately as Richard Branson's space tourism, but we'll see.

North Korea is still one of the most difficult countries on the planet to deal with.

(Special thanks to Mildred for showing me these articles)

North Korea intends to build more nuclear reactors; everybody else unhappy.

The North announced on Tuesday its intention to build the light-water reactors and threatened to resume work on two graphite-moderated reactors, which could produce large amounts of material for atomic bombs.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department has made clear that any reactor construction would break commitments North Korea made at the talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Do you know how difficult it is to get these six countries to agree on anything? Well, it doesn't seem important to N. Korea (meaning Kim Jong-Il) to please anybody else, so he's continuing work on his nuclear reactors. Oh, well, call it par for the course.

Near the end of the article, this quote occurs

The next round of the six-party talks is likely to take place in January, according to sources familiar with the discussions. But there is doubt about whether North Korea will participate, partly because of Pyongyang's anger over a U.N. vote to condemn it for human rights abuses and a U.S. crackdown on its finances.

I'm not sure, but the "U.S. crackdown on its finances" may have something to do with N. Korea forging and distributing bogus U.S. $100 bills. (I know the article is the Washington Times, but I only use it because it's succinct.) Also read this article.

Last but not least, N. Korea is lifting the ban on cell-phones...except they're building a system to block any calls to outside N. Korea.

At the same time, N. Korea is also going to refuse foreign food aid.

One analysis of this action that I think is likely is this:

In the eyes of North Korea, nongovernmental organizations are subversive, trying to undermine their system," said Shi Yinhong, a professor with People's University in Beijing. "It's also revenge against U.S. accusations that North Korea is engaged in counterfeiting, smuggling and drug trafficking. To toss out the NGOs is perhaps the only measure it can take other than condemning Washington.

In other words, N. Korea will hurt its own people in secret rather than take help but have to listen our jibber-jabber about human rights.

One year

Since the tsunami, and more than 200,000 dead. Millions still homeless, thousands of children without parents, and families and lives shattered for a long, long time. Let's be thankful for what we have.

The 14th Amendment, Birthright Citizenship, and Illegal Immigrants

In the ever-growing political hotbead that is the issue of illegal immigrants, one topic of interest as of late has been that of "birthright citizenship" which, as its name implies, means that any person born in the United States has the full rights and privileges of being an American citizen. This was provided for in the Constitution's 14th Amendment passed after the end of the Civil War. Section 1 of that amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Conservatives and others have tried to make an issue out of the fact that the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States instantly become U.S. citizens. So much so, in fact, that Georgia Republican Rep. Nathan Deal along with 70 co-sponsors tried to include a revocation of birthright citizenship in an immigration bill passed by the House in mid-December. GOP House leaders did not let the proposal come to a vote, probably wary of looking too extreme (even as they passed funding to build the Great Wall of America on the border) and I'd like to say it's blatant unconstitutionality, if I believed they cared about that.

Aside from the fact that it would be pretty cruel to revoke citizenship of the children of illegal immigrants who have lived in America since they've been born, the proponents of this legislation really haven't thought of all the ramifications through. First, let's consider the fact that deporting an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants that are in this country is not a practical option (though I'm sure right-wing extremists favor this nonetheless). Even if we do grant them a new kind of legal status as "guest workers" what status would their children have in the country? What rights would they have? One would assume guest workers would be given the constitutional protections provided to American citizens whilst in the country (though I'm sure Republicans would fight this point considering as they don't even believe Americans have constitutional rights anymore). So if there children aren't guest workers and are no longer considered illegals in such a scenario, what would their status be? Would they, should they not be considered American citizens? In Germany, the children of guest workers are not considered citizens and it has lead to enormous social and racial tensions.

Of course, conservatives don't care about these questions. They just care about having another race-splitting wedge issue that will fire up their base or drive swing voters away from Democrats or the polls in general come the mid-term elections.

Now I want to make known that I am not someone who believes that illegal immigration is simply not a problem that we should be concerned about. In fact, I agree with the McCain-Kennedy proposal that would tighten border security while creating a guest worker program (both practical matters in my mind) that would allow them to eventually apply for green cards. We also certainly need to go after the businesses, big and small, that hire illegal immigrants (a part of the problem Republicans often fail to mention).

I do not however agree with these borderline ractist loonies that call for walls to be built, armies to be put on the border, and the undermining of the sacred 14th amendment. Even if I believed them not to be outlandish and wrong, they wouldn't work. Look, until we address the economic issues that lead so many to cross our border we will not stop illegal immigration. We could all stand on the border whilst holding hands and people would still come through as long as they are sleeping on mud streets in Mexico.

So let's agree to stop talking about the wrong issues when it comes to illegal immigration and start talking about the right ones. Maybe then we can finally make some progress we can all be happy with.

Happy Holidays

No links to political nefariousness today...just a wish for a Merry Christmas to everyone.

Poverty, Income Inequality and Health

That there is a correlation between poverty and a higher risk of a disease and shorter life span is well known However, an examination of several different studies (subscription required) in the December Scientific American leads these researchers to conclude that psychosocial stresses associated with poverty may increase the risks of many illnesses.

When you examine socioeconomic status (SES), a composite measure that includes income, occupation, education and housing conditions, it becomes clear that , starting with the wealthiest stratum of society, every step downward in SES correlates with poorer health.

Researchers have long known that people with low socioeconomic status (SES) have dramatically higher disease risks and shorter life spans than do people in the wealthier strata of society. The conventional explanations-that the poor have less access to health care and a greater incidence of harmful lifestyles such as smoking and obesity-cannout account for the huge discrepancy in health outcomes.

It's a common presumption that since for the poor health care is less easily accessible and of lower quality, this alone can explain the differences in health between them and the well-off. But the authors of the article point to a decades-long series of studies in the UK which show otherwise. The British researchers targeted civil servants at different ends of the spectrum and found that despite the fact that all the employees had access to the UK's universal health care system, those on the lower end (messengers and porters) have "far higher mortality rates from chronic heart disease than administators and professionals do." Other studies also show that the SES "gradiant" (the difference in quality of health between the poorest and the wealthiest) exists even for diseases for which health care access is irrelevant: "No amount of medical checkups, blood tests and scans will change the likelihood of someone getting type 1 (juvenile-onset) diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis, yet both conditions are more common among the poor."

An unhealthy lifestyle is also unable to entirely explain the difference. The UK studies, controlling for such factors as smoking and level of exercise, were still able to only account for about 1/3 of the SES gradient, leaving a full 2/3 of the difference to be explained by something other then unequal access to health care and different lifestyles.

The authors state that the differences can be explained only by taking into account what they call the "psychosocial consequnces of SES", or in other words the stressful effects of being poor, and the long-term consequences of those effects. The authors postulate that the chronic stress of being poor is the only way to account for the otherwise unexplainable differences in quality of health between the well-off and the poor:

An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activiate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support for the duress cuased by the stressors.

These factors apply to stress in general, but it is easy to overlay this structure on a person living in poverty, and see how they correlate nearly exactly the circumstances they find themselves living in; little control over their economic situation, no way to know if or when their poverty will end, no means to take their poverty off their mind, feeling in general that their situation can only worsen and lacking family or societal networks to provide for any means to alleviate their conditions of living or their poverty.

Their conjecture is not so surprising. The authors are careful to explain the well-documented deleterious effects of long-term stress in general on the body, and there's no doubt that living in poverty is more stressful then living well or living wealthy. What is surprising is that more than the subjective condition of poverty is at work here; in fact, people are worse off when the feel poor:

This same point emerges from comparisons of the SES/health gradient among nations. A relatively poor person in the U.S. may objectively have more financial resources to purchase health care and protective factors than a relatively wealthy person in a less developed country yet, on average, will still have shorter life expectancy (italics mine.)

And the yet the SES gradient is not the only explanation for the difference in the quality of healthy between the poor and the wealthy:

Over the past 15 years [Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham] have reported that the extent of income inequality in a community is even more predictive than SES for an array of health measures. In other words, absolute levels of income aside, greater disparities in income between the poorest and the wealthiest in a community predict worse average national health. Wilkinson has shown…that decreased income inequality predicts better health for both the poor and the wealthy.

Put more simply, SES explains the difference in quality of health between the poor and the wealthy in any society, but the quality of health is lower in societies in which there are larger gaps between the poor and the wealthy. What explains this phenomenon?

Wilkinson and other in the field have long argued that more unequal income in a community is, the more psychosocial stress there will be for the poor. Higher income inequality intensifies a community’s hierarchy and makes social support less available...Moreover, having your nose rubbed in your poverty is likely to lessen your sense of control in life, to aggravate the frustrations of poverty and to intensify the sense of life worsening.

Wilkinson’s income inequality work suggests that the surest way to feel more is to be made to feel poor-to be endlessly made aware of the haves when you are a have-not.

Unfortunately, other studies show that income inequality not only influences public health, but helps to perpetuate a lower quality of public health:

John W. Lynch and George A. Kaplan of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have recently proposed another way that people are made to feel poor. Their "neomaterialist" interpretation of the income inequality phenomenon…runs as follows. Spending money on public goods (better public transit, universal health care and so on) is a way to improve the quality of life for the average person. But by definition, the bigger the income inequality in a society, the greater the financial distance between the average and the wealthy. The bigger this distance, the less the wealthy have to gain from expenditures on the public good. Instead they would benefit more from keeping their tax money to spend on their private good. So, the more unequal the income is in a community, the more incentive the wealthy will have to oppose public expenditures benefiting the health of the community.

In other words, as the well-off become wealthier, they have more income to spend on health care and so benefit less from publicly available health care. As they benefit less, they seek to spend less on public health care. As they spend less on public health care, decreased average public health results. And as there is a very clear reciprocal relationship between health and economic opportunity (as in those who are in poor health are less able to work and vice versa) it becomes clear that as far as public health is concerned, income inequality perpetuates itself.

What these numerous studies show us then is that while universal health care would do much to reduce the low quality of public health in our country, continuing differences in income in our country and the vast and ever-growing income inequality will act significantly to prevent the poor from enjoying even close to the advantages in health that the wealthy enjoy. And while the idea of universal health care in our country is slowly gaining traction, it is much less likely that we'll be able to do anything about income ineqaulity anytime soon.

DCJ Holds Man Without Charges for 15 Months

Through simple ineptitude, the Dallas County Jails held a 69-year old man for 15 months without ever getting around to charging him:

Mr. Mann's story, as told through court filings and interviews, began in summer 2002, when his 13-year-old son assaulted him. The son went to a juvenile detention center. Mr. Mann – unemployed with an eighth-grade education and on disability benefits, according to court records – was assessed a $50 monthly payment to compensate the county for housing the boy.

Mr. Mann didn't pay. In spring 2004, the district attorney's office filed a motion for contempt of juvenile court. After Mr. Mann failed to appear for a July hearing, the court issued a writ of attachment – a little-known civil order that commanded authorities to bring him before a judge.

Once booked into jail in September 2004, the man with no apparent criminal record served a few days in jail for three minor justice-of-the-peace warrants, issued for writing bad checks. Then he waited in jail. More than a year passed. A ruling was never made in the contempt case. Even if he had been found guilty and given a maximum sentence, he would have faced a $500 fine and six months in jail, according to state law. The cost to confine him for 15 months totaled nearly $10,000, according to county averages.

This is the same jail system now under investigation by the FBI for civil rights abuses. I'm really not sure if it's worse when this happens through malice, or just plain old beauracratic stupidity.

But Why in Secret?

Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article over at Slate on the President's motivations for secretly creating the NSA domestic surveillance program. To here there are two possible explanations; either President Bush thinks the system of checks in balances in place is inconvenient, or he think it's broken and cannot be fixed. Lithwick thinks the latter is worse:

The former argument was offered this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who defended the secret spy program with the astonishing claim that Congress wasn't told because Congress would not have passed it. Gonzales said the administration considered asking Congress to authorize the program but was "advised that that was not something we could likely get." (This, even though Congress just about sold off the farm after 9/11, granting the president every extra power he requested.) That just can't be right. And it isn't. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained so eloquently at his recent confirmation hearings, the Youngstown case, decided by the Supreme Court in 1952, stipulated that "where the president is acting contrary to congressional authority … the president's authority is at its lowest ebb." The courts have expressly said that if Congress wouldn't sign off on the deal, executive-branch authority is lesser, not greater.

The other argument for consistently reneging on bargains about civil liberties was put forth by President Bush this week when he insisted that we are facing a "new threat requiring us to think and act differently." The existing laws that govern his conduct are helping the terrorists and hurting us. Bush's admission—that he authorized a program four years ago that is secretly monitored and reauthorized by himself—is astonishing. His admission that he intends to continue to do so masks a darker truth: He believes that FISA can't be fixed. Like the judicial system for Americans or the courts-martial system for prisoners of war, FISA can't be modified to protect us; it must be overridden by fiat and in secret.

She then surveys the list of defenses Bush apologists have offered for this program; he has inherent authority to do so, he was given the authority to do so by the Authorization to Use Military Force against Afghanistan, the FISA system is too restrictive and burdensome, there's no proof anyone's constitutional rights have been violated, the power is necessary to fight terrorism, etc., etc., etc. But none of these begin to explain why Bush felt the need to do all of this in secret, without the public's knowledge, without any oversight:

Americans believed they were bargaining in good faith with their government over the original deal struck in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA was supposed to represent a compromise between security and civil liberties, by making it illegal to spy on Americans without judicial oversight but setting the bar for such oversight quite low. Even as amended by the Patriot Act—which further lowered the standards for a FISA warrant—the statute still purported to adhere to the fundamental bargain: Americans would not be spied upon by their government without basic constitutional checks in place.

And that is exactly the problem. With this system, Bush has indicated his contempt for the rule of law, his contempt for the American people, and his contempt for the Constitution. The first in that FISA states what authority he does and does not have to exercise surveillance over American citizens in America. The second in that he felt no need to have a public discussion of any kind over this issue, fearing the public's reaction (and rightly so.) To me it is simply incredible that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez seriously believes he can claim in public that they did not go to Congress with their proposal, because they knew they would not get approval. If they knew that, then it's because they knew what the public would think of the program. The third in that he as best dismissive of the oversight functions of Congress and the the Judiciary, and believes that in wartime his powers are essentially unlimited. A man who felt as such should never have been elected President of our great country in the first place. It is in our best interests to see him go, and the earlier the better.

Judges to be Briefed; "Impeachment" No Longer a Dirty Word?

Judges on the secret FISA court will be briefed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on the NSA spy program:

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"

...U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days.

"Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants. "I share the other
judges' concerns," he said.

But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it.

"I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics."

Like most of us, I think the judges' concerns are not over the program so much as the secrecy with which it was implemented, and the deliberate decision that was made to bypass the FISA court.

A couple of paragraphs in the article also shed light on the nature of the NSA program:

The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites.

"There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States."

The exact nature of the program remains unknown, but this information-and President Bush's comments-do give credence to the idea that it's some sort of massive data-mining operation, that focuses not so much on specific communications by specific persons, but sifting through a massive amount of communication for anything that hints at possible terrorist operations or connections.

Dan Froomkin also writes in the Washington Post about the return of impeachment. Obviously, no one seriously thinks that Bush is going to be impeached anytime soon. But the word is no longer being bandied about only on liberal blogs:

The revelation that President Bush secretly authorized a domestic spying program has incited a handful of Congressional Democrats to discuss his possible impeachment. And while continued Republican control of Congress makes such a move extremely unlikely, the word is reemerging into mainstream political discourse.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) sent a letter on Monday to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking them whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense. Boxer wrote that her interest was sparked after former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said the surveillance order was an impeachable offence. "I take very seriously Mr. Dean's comments, as I view him to be an expert on presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future," she
wrote.

Ron Hutcheson writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers that "some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.

"(TM)'The president's dead wrong. It's not a close question. Federal law is clear,' said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law. 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors.'

Again, it's obvious that unless control of the House shifts there will be no impeachment. But the fact that it's even being discussed shows how far Bush has fallen, and as with all media memes it's self-perpetuating, and discussion of it tends to propogate further discussion. The longer it lasts, the greater the chance that discussion will end in actual impeachment.

In case you'd forgotten...

...Jack Abramoff is still happening. In light of recent events, it may not seem like the Abramoff case is all that important. However, this case could have far-reaching effects.

Prominent party officials, including the former House majority leader, Representative
Tom DeLay of Texas, are under scrutiny involving trips and other gifts from
Mr. Abramoff and his clients.

The other name being mentioned in this case is Congressman Bob Ney, R-Ohio.

A guilty plea by Michael Scanlon, a former Abramoff partner, alleged that Ney received campaign donations and gifts such as a 2002 golf trip to Scotland in return for official acts such as supporting legislation favorable to Abramoff's clients.

Abramoff is currently trying to make a plea bargain:

Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist under criminal investigation, has been discussing with prosecutors a deal that would grant him a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against former political and business associates, people with detailed knowledge of the case say.

The question is only this: who will he be testifying against? We know Tom DeLay is already in trouble for corruption, so I wouldn't be too surprised now if he was named in this case.

I heard some Democrats talking about a "culture of corruption", referring to the Republican party. Well, I don't like hyperbole, but in this case it seems to have some merit. Abramoff was connected to a lot of Republicans, so we can expect to be hearing some more names soon from this.

Secret Court Judge Resigns; Senate Republicans Press for Hearings into NSA Program

I feel like I need to start a completely separate blog just to keep up with all the news on the domestic spying story. In the latest news, U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson has resigned from the secret intelligence court in protest over the NSA domestic intelligence gathering program:

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John D. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

Integrity is a rare find in Washington. Robertson is not alone in possessing it however. Apparently some Senate Republicans are troubled enough by the program to call for hearings even in the run-up to mid-term elections.

Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans yesterday joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.

Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year.

And so the fallout continues.

The Failure of the "War on Terror"

I enjoy reading Richard Reeves, partly because he finds these odd surveys and polls that don't get much play in the news (including a recent one on historian's opinions of President Bush.) In this column he discusses a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and and Press (in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Affairs.) The poll indicates that by and large, Americans are gradually turning away from involvement in world affairs:

"Opinion leaders have become less supportive of the United States playing 'a first among equals' role among the world's leading nations. ... As the Iraq war has shaken the global outlook of American influentials, it has led to a revival of isolationist sentiment among the general public."

A striking 42 percent of poll respondents among the general public agreed with this statement: "The United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own."

That is about the highest number in recent decades for the "isolation" index used in national polling -- higher than it was after the war in Vietnam, higher than it was after the end of the Cold War.

The explanation for this profound change is actually pretty simple. As many Americans see an increasing cost in involvement in the affairs of other nations, they begin to believe that the cost is too high, and that we should be less involved overseas.

Which brings me to my larger point. In many respects, President Bush's global "war on terror" is a failure. It is not a failure because we should not be waging a campaign against terrorists and their supporters. It is a failure because of the means by which the Bush administration has chosen to carry that campaign out.

1. The Invasion of Iraq: Whatever you thought of the merits of the invasion of Iraq, it's impossible to argue that it was not in some sense a distraction from the campaign against Taliban and Al-Qaeda holdouts in Afghanistan. If you believe the insiders, the Bush administration had it's eyes on Iraq before the war in Afghanistan was even declared. One of the results of this inability to keep the eye on the ball was the failure to capture Bin Laden, the very architect of the 9/11 attacks. Presently, the Bush administration seems resigned to accepting a permanent low-level insurgency against the Taliban in Afghanistan. They have no choice, as we hardly have the ability to put an end to it.
2. The Occupancy of Iraq: Again, whatever you may have thought of the merits of invasion, it is obvious the occupation and democratization of Iraq has not gone according to plan. The occupation has not only been longer, more violent, and costlier then it could've been, but more importantly, then it needed to be. As a result the American public has begun to tire of the news of ceaseless casualties and suicide bombings, and calls for withdrawal that would have been unthinkable only a year ago now define the debate on Iraq. As a result we may end up leaving Iraq before the terrorists elements represented by Zarqawi and the foreign jihadists are contained.
3. The Detention Policies: Even if you consider that these policies may have garnered some actionable intelligence (the proof of which is impossible to obtain because the administration either won't release it, or it doesn't exist) there's no doubt that they have done nothing but damage America's credibility the world over. Hundreds have been detained in Guantanamo Bay with little or no rational standard for determining who belongs there and why (witness the release of many of these prisoners by and administration which claimed to be holding vicious terrorists and murderers.) As far as anyone knows, there's no long-term plan for what to do with these prisoners. They cannot be tried in American courts, they cannot be released to other nations without being imprisoned, tortured or killed, and they cannot realistically be kept forever in Guantanamo. Then there are the "ghost" detainees, being held in secret prisons in other countries, possibly against the law of those countries. Then there are the "extraordinary renditions", where prisoners in our custody are turned over to dubious "allies" for torture and interrogation. Then there are the known detentions of American citizens and the unkown detentions of legal and illegal immigrants, over which the executive claims absolute authority to detain even for life. As a result, the United States finds itself facing the indefinite imprisonment of "enemy" or "unlawful" combatents the world over, with no real plan for how to deal with them beyond extracting all possible useful and useless information.
4. The Intelligence Policies: As we've learned in the last several days, President Bush authorized the NSA to collect intelligence on American citizens without court approval of any kind. In addition, the Pentagon is maintaining a database on anti-war groups, and the FBI spends valuable time and energy infiltrating domestic anti-war and left-leaning groups and causes. If these acts have gained any actionable intelligence, we wouldn't know, because the Bush administration refuses to tell us. The father of all of these programs of course is the Patriot Act. Little did we know at the time that it was only the beginning of the various means in which the administration would seek to collect intelligence.

An important result of every single one of these policies, has been the negative backlash that has accompanied them around the world and at home. We have damaged our credibility with other nations, making is such that those nations are reluctant to cooperate with us in our "war on terror." Backlash here at home threatens to dismantle the very programs that Bush says are protecting us from terrorists. As a result we now have a nation that is questioning the wisdom of the occupation in Iraq, and if the poll above is to believed, questioning the very involvement of American in affairs overseas. Such a result can hardly help us encourage democracy overseas. But the most important result is that if these policies have aided us in the "war on terror", the Bush administration won't tell us. It's far more likely actually that they've hurt us. Instead of "draining the swamp" in Afghanistan, we drove the Taliban from power but have allowed them to continue to carry out their attacks on U.S. soldiers, Afghan civilians, and the Afghan government. Bin Laden hides supposedly somewhere in the Pashtun, almost certainly biding his time until another terrorist operation can be carried out. Iraq has been the scene of incredible carnage almost from the instant the insurgency began, and it has drawn terrorists, jihadists and suicide bombers to Iraq like flies to a honeypot. Our intelligence organs at home seem at least as concerned with the threat of domestic terrorism in the form of paint being thrown on fur coats, as with the threat of foreign terrorists sneaking in from overseas. Bush has promised that his goal is to keep America safe. But it is impossible to argue that any of the acts of his administration over the last four years has in any way made us safer. Considering the willingness of the Bush administration to trumpet the uncovering of even the most insignificant of terrorist plots (think the "Lackawanna Six" ) one must assume that there have simply been no terrorists caught plotting any signficant attacks in or on American since 9/11. Does that mean that they aren't there? We just don't know.

Simply put the Bush administration policies have been a failure. If we are any safer we don't know it, and all the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion.

A review of what happened to the Internet in 2005

Evidently it's been a big year for the internet. Some of the points that the article covers are:

1. The changing face of the internet due to the expansion of broadband into a major percentage of internet access.
2. Legal music download services. This is getting to be a big part of the internet economy. Apparently, people love music and are willing to pay for it!
3. Google everything.
4. Internet telephony. I'm sure everyone who reads this blog is familiar with voice chat, especially as offered by AIM, Yahoo, and MSN.
5. Cities offering wifi networks (especially the free ones). Cities offering free internet, usually at public libraries, is no new thing, but cities are making wireless internet freely available to anyone in the city. Amazing, yes?

The author makes a very intriguing final statement:

Late update: Vonage just announced it will soon introduce a mobile handheld
Internet phone that can utilize WiFi hotspots -- or citywide wireless -- at less
than today's cell-phone services. When wireless, high-speed Internet is
ubiquitous, all telecomm bets are off.

Very interesting. Of course, you can also use that voice chat that the IM services make available while logged on to a city's free wifi network. A defacto free telephone service? Technology is taking us into some very new territory. It remains to be seen how the government (at the federal level) views all this and how they'll get involved.

Why Circumvent FISA?

One of the questions floating around the domestic spying story is why Bush and his cronies felt the need to go around FISA and the secret intelligence court. In reviewing decisions of the court it's clear that the number of times it's disallowed a wire-tap or other intelligence gathering operations can be counted on one hand. Additionally, the Attorney General is allowed to get retroactive approval from the court for domestic wire-taps. If approval from the court is so generous, what exactly would prompt Bush to need to get around even those resrictions? Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly blog has an interesting theory:

After all, the FISA court would have approved taps of domestic-to-international calls as quickly and easily as they do with normal domestic wiretaps. What's more, Congress wouldn't have had any objection to supporting a routine program expansion; George Bush wouldn't have explained it with gobbledegook about the difference between monitoring and detecting; Jay Rockefeller wouldn't have been reminded of TIA; and the Times wouldn't have had any issues over divulging sensitive technology.

It seems clear that there's something involved here that goes far beyond ordinary wiretaps, regardless of the technology used. Perhaps some kind of massive data mining, which makes it impossible to get individual warrants? Stay tuned.

It's an interesting question, and an intriguing theory. I don't really know if some massive data mining is going on, but it sure seems that it's something more then ordinary intelligence gathering. I'm sure in the coming weeks will get a better idea of what exactly the NSA has been up to.

NSA Not Alone in Spying on Americans

News about the NSA's secret intelligence gathering program in the United States has been making the rounds most recently. But a couple of articles in the Washington Post remind us that these program is only part of an effort to direct intelligence gathering by law enforcement, civilian and military intelligence services against the United States. This article in Sunday's Post summarizes the most recent revelations:

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for "detecting, identifying and engaging" internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.

An article in today's Washington Post discusses in greater detail the Pentagon's newest programs:

The Pentagon's newest counterterrorism agency, charged with protecting military facilities and personnel wherever they are, is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, according to a Pentagon fact sheet on the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, provided to The Washington Post.

Its Directorate of Field Activities (DX) "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," the fact sheet said. Those roles can range from running roving patrols around military bases and facilities to surveillance of potentially threatening people or organizations inside the United States. The DX also provides "on-site, real time . . . support in hostile areas worldwide to protect both U.S. and host nation personnel from a variety of threats," the fact sheet said.

Another CIFA directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure from "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," according to the Pentagon.

CIFA manages the Pentagon database that includes Talon reports, consisting of raw, unverified information picked up by the military services on suspicious activities that could involve terrorist threats. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that the Talon database contained reports on peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations that should have been purged long ago under Defense Department regulations.

Now to be fair, it's not unreasonable for to expect the Pentagon to manage some domestic intelligence gathering, especially if it's aimed at the protection of U.S. military personnel and material in the United States. However a problem presents itself when we see the Pentagon collecting "intelligence" on anti-war protesters. The reasoning of course is that these protesters could prove in some way a threat to the U.S. military...which of course has never made any sense, and even if it did, could not justy widespread spying on any and all anti-war protesters.

Essentially, Bush has authorized greater and greater intrustion into the lives of average American civilians, in a supposed to effort to find terrorists living and plotting in our midst. If one were the trusting sort, one might believe this claim. The problem is, as history has shown us repeatedly, is that if you concentrate too much power in the hands of too few people, allow them to keep secret their purposes and methods, and provide no check by another group of people in power, you will-abolutely, 100% of the time-see this power abused. It's simply invetable. The spying on anti-war groups is the only absue we know about. If you think it's the only once that's occurred so far...well, I have a fine ski slope down here in Texas I'd like to sell you. The reason there are checks and balances in our system of government is because the Framers knew precisly what happens when you give one branch too much power, and require too little oversight. Bush has forgotten this lesson (if he ever knew it) and betrayed the Constitution of our nation as a result.

Update: The FBI is also engaging in the classic "investigating" of anti-war and other left of center groups, including the ever dangerous PETA.