Obsidian Wings

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

by hilzoy

Once upon a time, our senior government officials used to pretend to tell the truth. Sometimes it was only a pretense. But, in general, they did not say things that were obviously, flatly false.

I guess that's just one more thing that changed on 9/11.

Today, Condoleeza Rice made a speech that was remarkable for its sheer bald-faced dishonesty. I have not tried to pick out all the false statements she made. But here are a few of the more obvious howlers:

New Orleans: You're On Your Own

by hilzoy

Peter Gosselin had a very good story on reconstruction in New Orleans in yesterday's LATimes. In it, he makes two different points, both of which are very important.

The first is that despite President Bush's promises, the federal government has really failed to deliver a lot of badly needed assistance:

"But in recent weeks, a new reality has settled in as the agencies that were stepping up to help guide the city's comeback have stepped back down again.

FEMA said it would stop covering the hotel costs of more than 50,000 households at the beginning of December — later extended until Jan. 7 — even while acknowledging that many, especially in New Orleans, would have trouble finding alternative accommodations.

Despite repeated pleas, the corps and the White House refused to promise any strengthening of the levees beyond what was underway. Investigators, meanwhile, concluded that several of the protective walls that failed did not meet corps-approved standards, a discovery that raised doubts about the safety of the entire levee system.

Emergency spending slowed sharply. The national flood insurance program temporarily suspended claims payments for Katrina, and program officials hinted broadly that they would tighten eligibility requirements to get coverage for the next storm.

Even the tiny agency charged with gauging the elevation of America's ground added an unexpected hurdle. It quietly announced that New Orleans and environs had sunk more than anticipated, forcing it to replace all of its measuring sticks. The result is that New Orleanians will have to build higher to escape future floods.

With so many new strikes against it, the city's recovery, already grindingly slow, has ground still slower. Three months after the storm, Entergy New Orleans, the bankrupt utility that serves the city, said that 55,000 of its 190,000 customers had resumed electrical service. Municipal officials estimate that less than one-third of the population has returned to live.

To an extent almost inconceivable a few months ago, the only real actors in the rebuilding drama at the moment are the city's homeowners and business owners. To be sure, Washington is offering many relief payments, tax breaks and FEMA trailers. The city is speeding the approval of building permits. But for the rest, individual New Orleanians are struggling to come back largely under their own power, using mostly their own resources and negotiating their return substantially on their own terms."

This is unconscionable all by itself. But it's a lot worse given the second point: that rebuilding New Orleans is, in large part, the sort of collective action problem in which the government can play an absolutely crucial role. And its failure to step up to the plate means that it is not doing what only it can do to help solve that problem.

""There is no market solution to New Orleans," said Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland, who won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of the complicated bargaining behavior that underpins everything from simple sales to nuclear confrontations.

"It essentially is a problem of coordinating expectations," Schelling said of the task that Vignaud and her neighbors must grapple with. "If we all expect each other to come back, we will. If we don't, we won't.

"But achieving this coordination in the circumstances of New Orleans,'' he said, "seems impossible.""

Come Home, Joe

You were my man in 2004 (well, aside from Mitch).  Only you can restore dignity and competency to an office disgraced by incompetence and stupidity.  Joemomentum my ass:  this is duty, manifest destiny style.  The Ninja must do what others have not and cannot.

The left wing of the Republican party pines for you (we are oh-so-lonely). The crazies in the Democratic party don't appreciate you.  Obey the Kos:  Come home, Joe.

Not So Extraordinary After All

by Katherine

It was almost two years ago that I asked the question, "How Extraordinary is Extraordinary Rendition?"; whether what was unusual about the U.S. sending Maher Arar to be tortured in Syria without any real evidence that he was a terrorist was that it happened, or that we knew about it. The answer seems to be "that we knew about it." As Hilzoy noted below, the Washington Post reported Sunday that the CIA is investigating up to 36 "erroneous renditions".

So. Who are these men? We know of at least two: Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri (whose case is decribed in the Post article). Who else?

I don’t know what standard they use to declare a rendition erroneous—whether the suspect needs to affirmatively show innocence, or merely that he does not produce "actionable intelligence" and there is no evidence against him other than his own or someone else's confessions under torture. There are also many cases where I have no real idea about the suspect’s guilt or innocence. So the CIA could be including some of the other renditions that have been publicly reported in that total.

But I have followed this subject very closely, and I definitely do not know about three dozen renditions that a CIA officer would be likely to describe as "erroneous." Nowhere even close to that.

And where are these men? It is possible that some of them were released, but neither they nor their family has ever spoken to the press or a human rights organization. In the cases that we do know of, there is often a fairly long delay between the suspect’s release & his speaking to the press or the public, so it is possible that some may choose never to do this at all. Perhaps that is even a condition of their release from custody. But does that describe 25 or 30 of them? I doubt it. I really doubt it.

Of the 20-odd renditions that I do know of, a very small number of people have been freed: Maher Arar, Mamdouh Habib and Khaled el-Masri. That’s it. Muhammad al-Zery was reportedly released from an Egyptian prison but remains under surveillance and cannot leave the country or speak freely about what happened to him. The rest remain in prison—whether it’s Guantanamo, some CIA detention site, or foreign custody. We know from reading Priest’s description of el-Masri’s case that the discovery of a suspect’s innocence does not necessarily immediately lead to his release. And Khaled el-Masri is a German citizen. Mamdouh Habib is Australian. Maher Arar is Canadian. It is not a coincidence that the men released are citizens of wealthy, Western democracies that are U.S. allies.

Based on all of this, I would guess that most of the thirty-odd prisoners who were “erroneously rendered” are still in prison somewhere. I would also guess that some of them are still being subjected to torture right now.

But this won’t end when they stop being tortured, or when they are released from prison. Not for them.

Will To Win Watch

by hilzoy

When I realized that all we really need in order to win in Iraq is will and resolve, I thought my life would get a lot better. No more reading about American and Iraqi soldiers being blown to bits, the ominous rise in sectarian violence, the emergence of death squads, and the like. No: even though I am very concerned with the outcome of our little adventure in Iraq, I didn't need to know what was actually happening there. All I really needed to know about was the state of our national resolve.

Unfortunately, while that's not nearly as depressing as the news from Iraq -- for one thing, people here are not dying as a result of their resolve, or lack thereof -- it's still pretty depressing for those of us who think that there is No End But Victory, and that victory depends entirely on our national will. It's easy to dismiss the polls -- the President says he doesn't pay attention to them, so why should we? It's harder to dismiss the news that there is considerable doubt about the war in rural Georgia, of all places, and that significant numbers of people there are in favor of pulling out our troops.

But what on earth does it say about our national resolve that the student newspaper at Bob Jones University has just called for the withdrawal of American troops?

"THE ISSUE: National debate has grown more intense regarding ending the war in Iraq.

OUR VIEW: The U.S. government must gradually remove troops from Iraq, being responsible about the war but giving control back to Iraq.

The United States should start to gradually remove its troops from Iraq. We've been there long enough and done enough and spent enough.

Gradual withdrawal is the best of the three possible options. One of the other two possibilities would be remaining indefinitely while perhaps sending more troops. But how can we do that when we''ve already been there just about 32 months? When will the end come?

The United States can't really expect to make things perfect before ending its Middle East visit. The Iraqis won't feel independent and capable of launching out on their own until we, the Americans, the foreigners, have left. They needed us, but only for a while. So continuing the stay indefinitely risks losing the welcome."

I shudder to think.

(h/t Eric Muller. And don't you love the part about how we can't really expect to make things perfect before we leave?)

Teh Funny!

by hilzoy

The entire point of the rest of this post is to get you to click this link. (Via Pharyngula.) Trust me: do it now, and skip the summary.

***

OK, mistrustful people: it's a description of a fight about linguistics, which is, in the world of the piece, "widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum"; and, in particular, about whether 'Wrathful Dispersion' should be taught alongside the usual evolutionary theories of historical linguistics.

"The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. (...)

In the early days of evolutionary linguistics, Babelists used to taunt French-speaking evolutionists with cries of "Your father was a Roman!" WD, by contrast, acknowledges that languages can indeed change over time, and some Wrathful Dispersionists even concede that modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and so on may actually have developed from Latin after all. The existence of Latin itself, however, and its mutual unintelligibility with, say, Old Church Slavonic or Proto-Bantu, could only have arisen through the wrath of the disperser. When asked to provide evidence for the existence of a single global language in pre-dispersion times, they reply that of course no such evidence can be found, because the disperser in his wrath was quite careful to obliterate all traces of it. (...)

In lieu of offering any evidence for their own proposal, most Wrathful Dispersionists prefer to devote their energy to attacking the evolutionary approach to historical linguistics, which they generally refer to as Grimmism. Much of their animus is directed against the lone figure of Jakob Grimm, whom they depict as having made up the idea of linguistic evolution off the top of his head, and they delight in pointing out novel "exceptions" to Grimm's Law, such as the fact that English has the word paternal where Grimm's Law obviously predicts fathernal. The evolutionists respond that paternal was a later borrowing into English from Latin, to which the Wrathful Dispersionists reply triumphantly, "So your trees and waves can't explain everything!" (...)

Wrathful Dispersionists are also fond of pointing out gaps in the written record, noting that there is no physical evidence of different languages dating back any earlier than five thousand years ago, a date which is suggestively close to the one commonly attributed to the Tower of Babel by biblical literalists. The bulk of their case against evolutionism, though, is based on the notion of irreducible perversity. For example, they argue that the sheer alienness of Basque—its apparent lack of any resemblance to any other living language—could only have come about by deliberate, wrathful (and, the Babelists would add, divine) intervention. Similarly, they claim that the notorious "ruki rule" in Sanskrit (/s/ becomes retroflex in the environment of /r/, /u/, /k/, or /i/—a "calculatedly chaotic conglomeration comprising two vowels, a rhotic, and a surd") is so arbitrary and so confusing that it must have been the conscious invention of someone who was absolutely determined that Sanskrit should be thoroughly incomprehensible to native speakers of any other language, such as Finnish."

If you don't feel like discussing linguistics or evolution, consider this another open thread.

The War On Christmas, Swedish Style

by hilzoy

Who could resist a headline like: "Vandals Burn Swedish Christmas Goat, Again"?

"Vandals set light to a giant straw goat Saturday night in a central Swedish town, police said -- an event that has happened so frequently it has almost become a Christmas tradition. It was the 22nd time that the goat had gone up in smoke since merchants in Gavle, 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Stockholm, began erecting it to mark the holiday season.

Police spokeswoman Margareta Olander said officers received a call just after 9 p.m. to report that the goat was ablaze. "In just a couple of minutes only a sooty wooden skeleton remained," she said. There were no immediate suspects, but Olander said that one of two men seen running from the scene was wearing a Father Christmas mask.

Since 1966, just 10 of the 43-foot-high goats have survived beyond Christmas Day. Most were burned -- sometimes within hours of being built during the first week of December. The 1976 goat was hit by a car, while in 1997, it was damaged by fireworks."

That's my ancestral country for you! When Swedes declare a war on Christmas, they don't just ask cashiers to say 'Happy Holidays', or call 'Christmas trees' 'friendship trees'. (No doubt a name change that reflects extensive market research and focus-group testing, all paid for by the nefarious George Soros and his billions.) They don't even issue orders that "Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations" as "part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the UN, but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs."

No: in Sweden, they don't go in for such pathetic half-measures. When they declare war on Christmas, they burn down the Christmas goat! Repeatedly! Except for the years they decide to run it over with a car, or blow it up! Now that's what I call secularists gone wild.

Unless, of course, this is the work of Christians who think that the Christmas goat might be a pagan idol.

Consider this an open thread.

Oops; Our Bad.

by hilzoy

There's a new story about rendition in the Washington Post. Specifically, it's about cases in which we kidnapped people, held them incommunicado, and in some cases transferred them to the intelligence services to be tortured, because we thought they were terrorists -- but oops! we were wrong:

"The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials. One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said."

I had always thought that the possible consequences of giving someone a bad grade didn't go beyond minor unpleasantness*. Apparently, I need to think again.

Here's how it happened:

Priorities

by hilzoy

Via War and Piece, a story from Knight-Ridder:

" The State Department has been using political litmus tests to screen private American citizens before they can be sent overseas to represent the United States, weeding out critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to department officials and internal e-mails.

In one recent case, a leading expert on conflict resolution who is a former senior State Department adviser was scheduled to participate in a U.S. Embassy-sponsored videoconference in Jerusalem last month, but at the last minute he was told that his participation no longer was required. State Department officials explained the cancellation as a scheduling matter. But internal department e-mails show that officials in Washington pressed to have other scholars replace the expert, David L. Phillips, who wrote a book, "Losing Iraq," that's critical of President Bush's handling of Iraqi reconstruction.

"I was told by a senior U.S. official that the State Department was conducting a screening process on intellectuals, and those who were against the Bush administration's Iraq policy were not welcomed to participate in U.S. government-sponsored programs," Phillips said. "The ability of the United States to promote democracy effectively abroad is curtailed when we curtail free speech at home, which is essential to a free society," he said.

In another instance of apparent politicization, a request by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, to arrange a visit by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who lived in Indonesia when he was young, was delayed for seven months. The visit never occurred.

A prominent translator of Islamic poetry who toured Afghanistan to rave reviews last March fell out of favor when he later criticized the Iraq war in front of a department official, two U.S. officials said.

The practices appear to be the latest examples of the Bush administration's efforts to tightly control information, maintain "message discipline" and promote news about the United States and its policies. Bush opponents have been excluded routinely from the president's domestic events and campaign rallies. This week, Knight Ridder and other news organizations reported that the Pentagon has paid Iraqi journalists and newspapers to publish positive stories about the U.S. reconstruction effort there.

Current and former officials involved with the State Department's overseas speakers program said potential candidates were vetted -- via Internet searches, for example -- for any comments or writings that criticized White House policy."

Because, as we all know, criticism of this administration's policies, however soberly and cautiously offered, is exactly the same as criticizing the United States. "L'Etat c'est moi", indeed.

Laura Rozen's comment:

"In their bones, and certainly in their practices, these people don't really seem to appreciate some of the finer features of democracy - a free press, the right to free speech, laws, etc. Instead, look at the stream of mainstream reports we've been reading the past several months about the US covertly paying for propaganda in Iraq and disguising it as journalism, the Bush administration pushing for the CIA to be exempt from an anti torture amendment, the US running black site prisons in the former gulags of Eastern Europe. And just a total penchant for doing government in the dark. These traits - the torture, the secrecy, the propaganda, and now this report of vetting the political views before even sending Sen. Barack Obama to Jakarta -- are uniformly associated with dictatorships, not democracies. How can this administration possibly be a credible engine of exporting it?"

To which I would add: this is also one in a string of reports about administration officials vetting all appointees for political views, even appointees to groups like scientific advisory boards, whose role is simply to pronounce on scientific questions. Every time this or any other administration refuses to hire the best person for a basically apolitical job unless that person vocally supports them, that means that it places loyalty to itself over the job it's hiring for. If the administration were looking for a person to develop policy on prenatal care, and refused to hire any expert on prenatal care who was not a Bush loyalist, that would show that it is prepared to sacrifice the quality of its policy on prenatal care, and thus (potentially) the lives and health of our children, in order to reward Bush loyalists. Similarly for any similar job.

Cronyism always slights the importance of doing a job well. It always means caring more about loyalty than about performance. In an administration that would keep Donald Rumsfeld in office long after his expiration date, and appoint Michael Brown to be head of FEMA, this attitude is not the least surprising. But it's worth being angry about nonetheless.

A Techie Bleg

by Charles

One of my computers is driving me nuts!  Help!

I'm not sure how it happened, but my best guess is that either my wife or son clicked on an attachment they shouldn't have.  I have a Dell 2400 Dimension PC and it runs the home version of Windows XP.   The problem is this.  I can't open Internet Explorer, My Computer or Control Panel.  All other programs that I've tried work fine, including other Microsoft products.  I've run spyware and anti-virus programs to no avail.  I think what I need to do is initiate the system restore wizard and set the date for a week or two prior to the beginning of this sad episode, but I can't do this because I can't open Control Panel.  I think I can accomplish a system restore by clicking on the "run" button, but I can't figure out how to find the file name to make this process happen.  So here I am, at my wit's end, begging for help.  Any suggestions?