Democracy and the rule of law really are in trouble in the US

I mean, we knew that already.  But every week now seems to bring new evidences of what we all guessed, that the Cheney-Bush administration has been up to even worse things that what we  know.  This administration will be a cornucopia for conspiracy theorists for decades to come.

 

For analysis of some of the latest revelations see Can You Even Imagine How Bad it Must Have Been? by Marty Lederman Balkinization blog 05/16/07. Lederman is writing about the illegal warrantless spying program that became so drastic in it's criminality that even former Attorney General and committed foe of democratic liberties John Ashcroft didn't want to sign off on it.

That's kind of like trying to imagine something was to cruel for Dick Cheney to approve.

Lederman emphasizes just how outrageous whatever the spying program was doing must have been for Ashcroft to oppose it in such an apparently emphatic matter.

 

Tags: bush administration, illegal spying, nsa spying

Chemo fog

My Mississippi demographer friend Susan Mitchell has an article in Salon this week about her experiences with chemotherapy the last couple of years: This is my brain on chemo 05/14/07.

As the title indicates, it deals in particular with the side-effects of chemotherapy for cancer on the brain, the memory in particular. She writes:

Among cancer patients, "chemo brain" refers to both the immediate and the long-term effects of chemotherapy. I started chemotherapy in the fall of 2005. At the end of my first round, I was in a thick fog. Simply scheduling my next appointment was difficult for me. Two older women who were also patients at the cancer clinic kindly offered an explanation for my fumbling mind: "You have chemo fog." Among the more experienced cancer patients, this was a well-known phenomenon.

... Arguably, the shock of being diagnosed with cancer, the disorientation of being suddenly yanked out of a normal, healthy life and thrown into the world of life-threatening disease - the Big C variety no less - could be responsible for my mental lapses. But that degree of difficulty had to have an organic source.

... As more of us survive cancer, I would not be surprised if our post-treatment problems spawned a new branch of medicine. There will certainly be a demand for it, because however grateful we are for the treatments that battle cancer, I cannot imagine that many of us will quietly accept being left with a much diminished self, particularly those of us who are members of the boomer generation. If we can overcome cancer, surely we can overcome almost anything else.

I should add that when she refers to the "boomer generation", she's very literally an expert on the subject, generational issues being one of her main specialties in demography.

Susan also has a blog with one of her colleagues, Cheryl Russell, called DemoMemo.

Tags: cancer, chemo brain, susan mitchell

Andrew Bacevich's son killed in Iraq

One of the writers that I've quoted most often on military matters and on civilian-military relations is Andrew Bacevich. His 27-year-old son, also named Andrew, who was serving as a Army lieutenant in Iraq, was recently killed in action. Steve Clemons reflects on his death and his father's grief in What is Andrew Bacevich's Son's Life Worth? The Washington Note blog 05/14/07.

I blogged about an appearance by the senior Bacevich in 2005 when he was promoting his book published that year, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Bacevich in Berkeley 06/02/05). He mentioned in that talk that he had a son serving as a lieutenant in the Army, but I don't recall him saying that he was in Iraq at that time. Bachevich came off as a serious and respectful thinker with a good sense of humor and a real sense of decency. He expressed a disgust at the Cheney-Bush torture policy that seemed to be both professional shame for the officer corps and genuine Christian disgust. As I summarized it in my review of his talk:

During the question period, someone followed up on this point, asking how a regular person like Charles Graner gets to the point of committing acts like the Abu Ghuraib torture. Bacevich, noting that he himself is a practicing Catholic who believes in Original Sin, said one reason is that some people are just bad people. And Graner is one of them. He also blamed the senior officers for not exerting adequate control to prevent those crimes from occurring. He was quite adamant in saying that he thought the worst shame of Abu Ghuraib is that no senior officers had been held responsible, except for a female reservist general.

Juan Cole notes that Bacevich has been "a thoughtful critic of Bush's War" in Iraq and that "Bacevich, no less than Walt Whitman, is our courage-teacher, reminding us of a lost America of vitality and backbone".

My thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family.

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war

Mickey Mouse, jihadist?

Apparenttly so. According to this article, Mickey Mouse wirbt in Hamas-Sender für Jihad gegen USA und Israel Der Standard (Vienna) 10.05.07, Hamas is running a commercial featuring a Mickey Mouse-like character calling for people to fight against the United States and Israel.

Der Standard is a good paper - part of the "quality press" - of the sort that the United States used to have before Jeff Gerth's first article on Whitewater appeared in 1992 in the New York Times, as good a time-marker as any for when our "press corps" began its descent into haircuts, blowjobs, warmongering and galloping imbecility.

So I'm assuming this is accurate. I would be more skeptical of a report like this in an American paper, thinking it could be some sort of anti-Hamas "information operation". Which it could be. But it looks like a reliable report to me. Standard quotes the Israeli Palestinian Media Watch group but the Hamas source they quote doen't seem to be denying it. The Mickey character is called "Farfour", which Standard translates as "butterfly". (Butterfly?)

Mickey Mouse as an advocate for jihad? Go figure. That is just weird on so many levels.

I wonder if they licensed the rights from Walt Disney for this?

Tags: hamas, israel

Herod's tomb

Via Biblical Archaeological Review, "Herod's Tomb Found" 05/08/07, an article by the chief archaeologist of the site of Herod's tomb: Searching for Herod’s Tomb by Ehud Netzer.

The first article linked above reports:

Herod seems to have originally intended his tomb to be inside a mausoleum in Lower Herodium but changed his mind later life and decided to be interred inside the mountain itself. At the top of the mountain Herod had built a fortress, a mountain and a monument; the tomb itself was approached by a monumental staircase about 21-feet wide.

Herod’s ornate sarcophagus, however, had been smashed in ancient times, likely by participants of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (67-70 A.D.)—a reflection of how widely hated Herod was by his subjects, who saw him as a cruel puppet of Rome.

BAR also gives a link to this article: Researcher: We have found Herod's tomb byAmiram Barkat Ha'aretz 05/08/07.

Tags: herod's tomb

Zorro: Capítulos 55-59 (Apr 30 - May 4)

Her current mask is heavier than Zorro's (Photo: Telemundo)

My Zorro summaries are going to be shorter than usual for the next three weeks. But I'll try to do updates all along.

This past week, political drama was still in center stage. Esmeralda wound up back in the prison, this time in Sara Kalí's iron mask. Montero caught up with their group and Pizarro convinced Montero that he was intended to betray Esmeralda and Sara Kalí. Fortunately, Renzo realized that because Pizarro sent someone to follow him as he went to contact Sara Kalí and the other gitanos on the run. At the end of the week, she was still free but wanted to go back to save Esmeralda.

Montero because more and more dicatorial and more and more paranoid as time goes on. His men caught Alejandro and were dragging him to the prison to be executed. But Zorro, still suffering from amnesia but back in the saddle, came and rescued him. Alejandro is beginning to suspect - and may have already concluded - that Zorro is really Diego.

Zorro in one of his earlier movie incarnations

I've been joking about Alejandro's polygamy with Almudena and Yumalay. But this week they made it pretty much explicit in a conversation between Alejandro and his sister María Pia. When she heard that Yumalay was Regina's younger sister, she smirked and asked if Almudena knew what that means in her tribe's customs. Alejandro said, yes, she's my second wife. María Pia said matter-of-factly, "Almudena will never understand the native customs". But the two of them treated it as a practical matter, not as any kind of scandal.

Mariángel is pregnant with Montero's baby, but she told Diego it was his. Diego definitely doesn't trust her, and he's on the verge of remembering Esmeralda. Meanwhile, the Queen and the evil duke are preparing to head for America.

More intrigue and romance can be expected to follow.

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Polling

I have a love-hate relationship with opinion polls and marketing surveys. On the one hand, I'm fascinated by them. On the other hand, many of them are either poorly designed or subject to such various interpretations that they are more a pain in the rear than anything else.

Then there's the laziness of our "press corps" in reporting on them. Bush's approval ratings had to get into the low thirties and stay there for a while for the press to stop routinely referring to him as a "popular President". Now the advocates of High Broderist bipartisanship, in and out of the press, keep lecturing the Democrats on how unpopular it is for the Democrats to be all insistent on putting some kind of limits on the Iraq War. Greg Sargent gives us an example of the latest, along with the results of a recent Pew poll (Memo To Media: Public Supports Dems' Confronting Of White House TPMCafe 05/05/07):

Do you think Democratic leaders in Congress are going too far or not far enough in challenging George W. Bush's policies in Iraq, or are they handling this about right?

Too far 23%
Not far enough 40%
About right 30%
Don't know/Refused 7%

If I'm going to concentrate on a poll and what it means, I need to see the question itself. In this case, it seems pretty clear that a reasonable interpretation of this one is that 70% - that's over two thirds - of the American public either think the Democrats are doing the right amount of antiwar activity right now or that they need to go farther.

This is also a widely-reported story: Many troops in Iraq lack ethics, U.S. finds
International Herald Tribune/AP 05/05/07. When you look more closely in this ones, the disturbing findings remain disturbing but should be taken cautiously. And there is a section on soldier morale that seems to indicate that a favorite ideological claim of the war cheerleaders is not very soundly based in reality. Some of the more sensational findings include the following in the AP report:

Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect. ...

About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.

Forty-four percent of Marines and 41 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.

Thirty-nine percent of Marines and 36 percent of soldiers said torture should be allowed to gather important information from insurgents.

The lead paragraph says:

In a survey of U.S. combat troops in Iraq, fewer than half of marines and a little more than half of soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

AP reports of the survey, "The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq." More specifically, the report is called Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT IV) Operation Irai Freedom 05-07 Final Report 11/17/06 by the Office of the Surgeon-Multinational Force Iraq and Office of the Surgeon General - US Army Medical Command. Here's the MHAT IV Army site for the report.

This CNN news report on it, Study: Anxiety, depression, acute stress in combat troops 05/04/07, highlights the health implications for the US soldiers: "The latest Pentagon survey assessing the mental health of troops in Iraq found one-third of soldiers and Marines in high levels of combat report anxiety, depression and acute stress."

The "Battlefield Ethics" section begins on page 34 of the MHAT IV report, which is where the questions on treatment of prisoners and noncombatants are discussed. The report makes the following cautions about the ethics results:

Again, it must be kept in mind that this is the first time these survey questions have been used, thus it is impossible to compare the findings from this MHAT IV assessment of Soldiers and Marines with any other group of military personnel. Rather, these findings must be viewed as a starting point, a snapshot, for how Soldiers and Marines view Iraqi insurgents and non-combatants, how these views translate into battlefield ethical actions, and how violations of these ethics are reported.

I see this convention more and more in Army publications of using "Soldiers" with a capital S instead of the lower-case "soldiers" that is conventional English usage. It may be an attempt to show inter-service parity with the conventionally-capitalized "Marines". Still, it's kind of silly.

I'm not in the least inclined to minimize misbehavior or war crimes by American troops. They're wrong, they're damaging to the victims and to the United States, and they can fundamentally undermine the mission in a situation like the Iraq War. But in looking more closely at the survey report, it seems to me that some of the more sensational findings may be "softer" than they might appear on first glance.

As one example among several, page 40 shows a chart of results finding that significantly greater numbers of soldiers who had handled human remains were likely to report having damaged Iraqi property "unnecessarily" or hit/kicked noncombatants "unnecessarily". But what does "unnecessarily" mean in this context? Does it mean the respondent is saying he himself did one of these acts on his own initiative just for the hell of it, or because he was angry? Or does he mean that some operation of which he was a part destroyed a building or hustled civilians off the streets, in a situation where he judges it to have been unnecessary? Unless the question clearly defined "unnecessary" as outside the scope of the rules of engagement or otherwise specified, I'm not sure what the results on that tell us. Even the difference in responses between those who handled human remains and those who hadn't could be interpreted various ways. Does it mean they are more likely to go outside their own rules of engagement? Or might it mean that soldiers who see more combat are more likely to have handled human remains and also that they've
become more cynical about the war, as in, "this whole damn thing is unnecessary"?

Because it is an important subject, this particular ethics survey seems a pretty thin strand tohang any broad conclusions about soldiers' conduct on.

Many of the other survey questions have more of a track record and seem to be more solid. I was particularly struck by the findings about morale on pages 16-19. To hear our war fans talk, having Congress and the public debate the war is devastating to the morale of our troops in Iraq. So you expect to hear that the biggest morale problem is Dirty Hippies Back Home Criticizing The War, right?

You would be incorrect. By their rating scale, morale for both the Army and the Marines appears to be less than optimal. They found that the factors most affecting individual and group morale included deployment tempo; petty base camp rules; lack of fairness in assessing "morale, welfare and recreational (MWR) assets", such as the amount of R&R time burned up in traveling to and from Kuwait.

The focus group questions about morale (see Section II of the form in Appendix G) don't specifically ask about antiwar activity in the US. But they do include some open-ended inquiries like, "What can your leaders do to help maintain your well-being?" While apparently not a lot of them responded with, "Get me the hell out of here", they also did seem to have received a lot of complaints about the dirty hippie Democrats criticizing the war, either. The report doesn't include war criticize as being a signficant factor in morale. But it did include complaints like this:

An example of one of the most visible "FOB [forward operating base] rules" involved the wearing of the Army Physical Fitness Training Uniform (i.e., PT uniform). While some Soldiers were allowed to wear the tan, Army Combat Uniform (ACU) t-shirt with the black Army PT shorts, other Soldiers were not; while some Soldiers were allowed to wear their Army PT uniform into the dining facility, others were not; while some Soldiers were allowed to wear their Army PT uniform when not on duty, others were not. One unit that did allow Soldiers to wear either the tan ACU t-shirt or the Army gray t-shirt with their PT shorts mandated that when two or more Soldiers were walking together that they had to be in the same uniform. What rules Soldiers had to follow in the wearing of the Army PT uniform depended on both the unit and the basecamp, often with different rules existing within the same unit and on the same basecamp. Neither Soldiers nor Marines saw the link between the wearing of the PT uniform and combat readiness.

Hippie Democrats undercutting morale? Apparently not.

Getting to wear your PT uniform in the dining facility? Apparently doing much more damage to morale than the degenerate hippies.

Tags: iraq war