Obsidian Wings

AP, NBC Call VA Senate Race For Webb

by hilzoy

And that means that Democrats control the Senate. And that, in turn, makes me a very happy camper.

Last night I said to myself: whatever else happens, Santorum will lose, and that's a wonderful thing all by itself. If Weldon loses too, I will be very, very happy. If Allen loses -- well, then I'll be euphoric. I got all three, with Richard Pombo's loss thrown in for good measure, and control of both houses. So I am floating about on a cloud of bliss.

I'll try to write something more coherent about what I think this means at some point, but for now, all I can do is think of little phrases like "Chairman Leahy", and grin.

Goodbye, Donald!

by hilzoy

So: Rumsfeld is out. At least three years too late, but better late than never, when people are dying. And make no mistake: this one really matters. Even if God were to appear to Donald Rumsfeld in a vision and reveal some way of bringing a lasting peace to Iraq and Afghanistan while simultaneously transforming the military in unimaginably wonderful ways, Rumsfeld has lost so much credibility that he could not possibly acted on these revelations. And since he's still a first-class bureaucratic knife-fighter and Bush and Cheney still seemed to like him, no one else could have done anything good against his will. His departure was a necessary condition for any real change in Iraq or Afghanistan. Obviously, his resignation is a long way from ensuring that any such change actually happens, but at least it's not flatly impossible anymore.

I'm not thrilled by Gates, especially given his role in Iran/Contra. Nonetheless, barring some unforeseen development, I hope the Democrats don't pick a fight over this nomination. There are many, many worse people Bush could have chosen.

If I were a Republican, I'd probably be asking, with Rick Moran, why Bush didn't get Rumsfeld to resign before the election:

"Was it out and out hubris that kept the President from firing Rumsfeld before the election? Wouldn’t firing him have signaled a “change in course” and knocked the chocks from underneath the Democratic critique of “stay the course?” Did the President’s stubbornness and overweening pride prevent him from appearing to give in to his political opponents before an election?

I may be very tired and not reading this correctly but what this says to me is that Bush cared more about his personal standing than he did the party. The fact that he said a week ago that Rumsfeld would be his Secretary of Defense till the end of his term probably played a role in waiting until after the election. But firing Rumsfeld now rather than last week (or last month for that matter) just doesn’t make any sense to me."

Since I am me, however, I just think: well, it looks to me as though Bush undercut his party and its candidates on this one for no good reason, but then I've never had any idea why he does most of the things he does. Besides, the leaders of the Republican party are the geniuses who decided that W would make a good candidate for President, even though enough of them must have known, back in 1998 and 1999, that he was personally and intellectually unqualified* for the job. If that decision turns out to have damaged them, they have no one to blame but themselves.

***

* By "intellectually unqualified" I don't mean stupid. I have no idea what Bush's IQ is; if I had to guess, I'd guess on the high side of normal, though I'd also guess that some chunk of his natural intelligence has atrophied because of not being used. I mean a bunch of other things: he has no intellectual (or other) curiosity; he is uninformed; he doesn't seem to value listening to and weighing other opinions; he doesn't seem to realize the importance of figuring out the facts of an issue before deciding on policy.

Election Thread

by hilzoy

I don't know whether or not I'll update this as the evening progresses, but I might. In the meantime, here, with great big caveats (remember 2004! remember 2004!), are purported exit polls:

"Dem leads:
VA: 52-47
RI: 53-46
PA: 57-42
OH: 57-43
NJ: 52-45
MT: 53-46
MO: 50-48
MD: 53-46

GOPer leads:
TN: 51-48
AZ: 50-46"

Allen, Santorum, and Weldon losing: that would make me happy whatever else happened.

Dirty tricks in my very own state:

"Inaccurate sample ballots describing Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Senate candidate Michael S. Steele as Democrats were handed out to voters in at least four polling sites in Prince George's County this morning.

The ballots were distributed by people who said they arrived by buses this morning from Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Erik Markle, one of the people handing out literature for Ehrlich, who is seeking reelection, and Steele, the current lieutenant governor who is campaigning to replace retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D), said he was recruited at a homeless shelter in Philadelphia. (...)

The Ehrlich and Steele campaigns yesterday acknowledged sending out an election-eve flier, sporting pictures of Prince George's County Executive Jack B. Johnson, his predecessor Wayne K. Curry and former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume. The mailer, declaring itself an "official voter guide" and criticized by Democrats, suggested the three Democrats backed Ehrlich and Steele. Curry has endorsed Steele; none has endorsed Ehrlich."

Results should start trickling in after 7. Fwiw, I predict Democrats gaining 22 in the House and 4 in the Senate. (I'm blocking those exit polls out of my mind; this has been my prediction for a while. But I'm lousy at predictions; my record of getting them wrong is truly breathtaking.)

If We Can Send A Man To The Moon, Why Can't We Make A Decent Voting Machine?

by hilzoy

From TPMCafe:

"Reader PW writes:

My wife just came home from voting here in Webster Groves MO. She used the electronic touch-screen voting system. . . She touched Claire McCaskill's picture and the machine recorded a vote for Jim Talent. She then called one of the people running the polling center who helped her correct the problem. My wife then had to call the person over another time after it recorded her vote a Republican again. In her frustration she asked the person who was responsible for the design of this system. The polling person leaned in very close to my wife and whispered, "We're f----d."

Meanwhile, the Republican Governor of South Carolina has been turned away for not having proper ID, a voting machine wouldn't accept Rep. Jean Schmidt's vote, Missouri's Secretary of State was told she needed a photo ID when she didn't, and there were problems, some quite serious, all over.

[UPDATE: Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) turned away too... END UPDATE]

This is just not acceptable. We need to have a voting system we can feel confident of, with rules that are transparent, laws that are enforced, and machines that just plain work.

***

I should have noted in my last post that the office of Jay Fawcett (running in CO-05) has been vandalized for the second time, and he has received his third death threat. Oddly enough, I think CO-05 is also where Ted Haggard's church is; that area seems to be some sort of cosmic epicenter of strange and ugly things just now.

UPDATE: Also, the Kean for Senate HQ in New Jersey has been vandalized. H/t DaveC. END UPDATE

Antidemocratic Immoral Scumbags

by hilzoy

That's what I think of anyone who engages in voter suppression. Like this:

"Our own Alec Oveis, who sadly left the Prospect few months ago, calls in from Connecticut, where he's volunteering on behalf of Chris Murphy (one of Tom's "Dropkick Murphys" positioned to defeat GOP incumbents this year). He reports that voter fury over robocalls is amazing and palpable at the polling site he's near. Several people have gone out of their way to tell him and other Murphy people that they're voting for Republican incumbent Nancy Johnson strictly out of anger at the harassing phone calls they've been receiving from the Murphy campaign. Alec and other's explanations that those calls are actually paid for by Republicans have generally been falling on deaf ears (they are, after all, holding Murphy signs while offering these explanations)."

And this:

"Tim Daly from Clarendon got a call saying that if he votes Tuesday, he will be arrested. (...) The transcript from his voicemail reads:

"This message is for Timothy Daly. This is the Virginia Elections Commission. We've determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote on Tuesday. If you do show up, you will be charged criminally."

Daly has been registered to vote in Virginia since 1998, and he has voted for the last several cycles with no problem. He has filed a criminal complaint with the Commonwealth's attorney in Arlington."

Here's the recorded message (.wav). Also (same link as above):

"Widespread Calls, Allegedly from "Webb Volunteers," Telling Voters that their Polling Location has Changed.

A couple of examples:

a. Norman Cox has been registered to vote in the same location in Arlington since 1972. Someone from a 406 number (in Montana) called to tell him that his polling place has changed. [Note: The Webb Campaign is NOT making any such phone calls.] Cox said he believed that he was being mislead and the caller hung up.

b. Peter Baumann in Cape Charles, VA (North Hampton) got a similar call from a "Webb volunteer" saying his polling location had changed. He said: No, I'm a poll worker and I know where I vote. The girl--who was calling from California--hung up.

The Secretary of the State Board of Elections Jean Jensen has logged dozens of similar calls, finding heavy trends in Accomack County (middle peninsula) and Essex County (outer peninsula) [as reported by the counties' registrars].

3) Fliers in Buckingham County Say "SKIP THIS ELECTION" (paid for by the RNC) have caused many in the African American community to call the Board of Elections to see if the election is still on. The full tag line says: "SKIP THIS ELECTION... (and then in smaller print): Don't Let the Tax and Spend Liberals Win.""

The FBI is looking into it.

And this:

"An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls."

And this:

"There are reports out of Nashville that African Americans are getting phone calls telling them if they voted for Harold Ford Jr. in the August primary, they don't need to vote for him again now.

According to media reports from Nashville, volunteers driving senior citizens to the polls for early voting have had their voters tell them they'd received these calls. "

And this (via AmericaBlog; it has a hateful registration system), which takes the Official Chutzpah Prize:

"Just because it's Scott Kleeb's prerecorded voice on the other line, doesn't mean his campaign is behind the phone call, according to his communications director.
Prerecorded telephone messages supposedly from Kleeb, a Third Congressional District candidate, have been repeatedly calling people in Central Nebraska, and Ben Lumpkin, Kleeb's communications director, is concerned about the effects.

The messages, known as robocalls, are designed to inform voters about certain candidates. However, Lumpkin said he has received numerous complaints about the prerecorded messages calling repeatedly -- as many as six times an hour. (...)

Adams County Democratic Party Chairwoman Deb Quirk, who also volunteers with the county's phone bank, said she and other volunteers had called people who were irritated at the Democratic party because of the Kleeb calls.

"We've had a couple of people who said they were tired of the harassing phone calls and wanted us to stop calling," she said.

Some of them said they weren't going to vote for Kleeb, or at all, as a result, she said."

And who could forget this gem, sent out a month ago by a Republican candidate in California?

"The letter, which purports to be from a Huntington Beach-based group, warns that immigrants will not be permitted to vote in the election. It also warns that the state has developed a tracking system that will allow the names of Latino voters to be handed over to anti-immigrant groups.

"You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time," the letter, written in Spanish, says."

There should be serious jail time in these people's future. I don't know enough about election law to know whether there will be, but it seems obvious to me that fines alone are not enough of a punishment for voter suppression. Campaigns can set aside money to pay fines; it's a lot harder for them to convince people to go to jail for a candidate*.

In my fantasies, our government decides to take the resources and jail cells it has used to combat marijuana use and devotes them all to catching, convicting, and imprisoning people who work against democracy, whether through voter suppression, accepting bribes, or any other form of public corruption. Parents warn their children not to grow up to be like Karl Rove and end up in jail, and not to let smooth-talking campaign operatives convince them that they can engage in just a little bit of underhanded election fraud, just this once, and they'll be able to quit any time. Organizations that pay for voter suppression are regarded the way we now regard drug gangs, and the people who work for them have to hide what they do from their friends and neighbors, because otherwise no one would speak to them. Their operatives have to stay underground, on the run, one step ahead of the law, knowing that each moment they spend at liberty could be their last.

Or, failing that, enough people become angry enough about this stuff that the people who engage in it are thrown out of office.

* PS: Guess who wrote a law providing for prison sentences for people who try to mislead voters about the time and place of federal elections, the qualifications for voting, etc? Just another "there he is again" moment. It's not clear to me, from the statute, whether the $100,000 fine/one year in jail penalty is per violation or not, but I hope so.

[UPDATE: From TPMMuckraker:

"I just spoke with a Latino election monitor in Arizona who said that a trio of men, one with a handgun visible, is harrassing Latino voters as they go to the polls in Tucson, Ariz. (...)

"As voters are coming out of their cars and walking up towards their polls, one person is videotaping the voter as he walks towards the polling place," she said. Then another person, wearing an American flag bandana and a shirt with the image of a badge ironed or embroidered on it, approaches with a clipboard to talk to the voter. "While the clipboard person is. . .talking to [the voter], the cameraperson comes up and starts videotaping their face," Perales said.

As this happens, the third man -- with a gun visible in a sideholster -- stands next to the voter. According to Perales, he is wearing a shirt with an American flag on it, and camouflage shorts.

The men only approach Latino voters, she said, and noted they have been doing so since early this morning."

END UPDATE]

Election-Free Public Service Announcement

by hilzoy

It is the season for flu shots, and so I thought I'd remind everyone that even though flu shots do not protect against avian flu, the threat of an avian flu pandemic gives everyone two additional reasons to get one.

(1) Influenza is a nasty disease. In the event of an avian flu pandemic, you do not want your body to be weakened by already having had the normal flu, nor do you want to get the normal flu when your body is already weakened by having had and survived avian flu. One bout of influenza is more than enough.

(2) One of the things people worry about is the possibility that avian flu and human flu might swap genes with each other, and that in this way the avian flu might acquire from the human flu whatever makes it more readily transmitted from one human to another. (Influenza viruses can do this.) This could happen only in a being that was infected with both avian and human flu at the same time. The chances that you personally will be the site in which this happens are pretty remote, but since the consequences are potentially enormous, it's worth taking it down to zero by getting a flu shot.

So if you've been putting it off, think about the fun of having two serious influenzas back to back, or being the person in whom avian flu assumes a new and much more contagious form, and go get your flu shot ;)

Update and P.S.: Consider this an open thread.

"What's Your Plan?"

by hilzoy

For some unfathomable reason, I decided to read the speeches our President has been giving recently in an attempt to motivate his base, and one point struck me as worth commenting on. It's this:

"If you happen to bump into a Democratic candidate, you might want to ask this simple question: What's your plan? If they say they want to protect the homeland, but opposed the Patriot Act, ask them: What's your plan? If they say they want to uncover terrorist plots, but opposed listening in on terrorist conversations, just ask them: What's your plan? If they say they want to stop new attacks on our country, but oppose letting the CIA detain and question the terrorists who might know where those plots are, ask them: What is your plan? If they say they want to win in the war on terror, but call for America to pull out from what al Qaeda says is the central front on the war on terror, ask them: What is your plan? See, they don't have a plan. They have no plan. (Applause.)

Harsh criticism is not a plan for victory. Second-guessing is not a strategy. If we were to leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy would be emboldened. This is a different kind of war. Unlike other wars, you could leave the battlefield before the job was done, and nothing would happen here at home. In this war, if we were to leave before the job was done, the enemy will follow us here. If we were to leave before the job is done, it would strengthen the hands of the radicals and extremists. If we were to leave before the job was done, it would dash the hopes of millions in the Middle East who want to simply live in peace. And if we were to leave before the job was done, it would dishonor the sacrifice of the men and women who have worn our uniform. (Applause.) The consequences of not fulfilling our strategy for victory would be felt for generations."

(This is an improvement over last week's version:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.")

The answer to some of these 'what's your plan?' questions are easy. Of course we don't oppose listening in on terrorist conversations, we just oppose doing so without a warrant. Our plan here is to use the perfectly good FISA system, and respect the Constitution. We don't oppose detaining and questioning terrorists; we just oppose torturing the people we detain and depriving them of the right to try to show that they aren't terrorists after all. As for protecting the homeland, our plan is to get serious about such minor matters as port security, rail security, protections for chemical and nuclear plants, and nuclear nonproliferation -- little things that this President has inexplicably let slide.

But the claim that we don't have a plan for Iraq is the heart of this part of the speech, and it's worth addressing it explicitly.

I agree with the President that the stakes are very high. If we withdraw from Iraq and the country descends into full-scale civil war, that would be a complete disaster for the Iraqi people. Worse, it might draw some of Iraq's neighbors into the fight and spark a regional war. Western Iraq might become a haven for terrorists, although I am somewhat heartened by the thought that al Qaeda does not seem to be very popular there. I could go on (and on, and on.)

I also agree that if you want to achieve some objective, it's a really good idea to have a plan: to work out in advance what you're going to do to make sure that you succeed, and that if things unexpectedly go wrong, you'll be able to cope with any ensuing problems. Sometimes, when your objective is not particularly important or it's obvious how to achieve it, you can dispense with plans -- I do not, for instance, normally work out a plan before getting up to get a soda. Establishing a peaceful, stable, democratic state in Iraq, however, is exactly the sort of goal for which planning is absolutely necessary.

So I'm with the President so far. I'm sort of surprised that he's saying this, however, for two reasons. First, it's wrong to say that the Democrats don't have a plan. They do. Second, I'm surprised that he thinks appreciating the importance of careful planning is a reason to vote for his party, since the importance of planning for victory has not been, shall we say, a hallmark of George W. Bush's approach to Iraq. After all, who can forget this?

"The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended."

How about this?

"The problem was simply this: The war plan was seriously flawed and incomplete. Invading another country with the intention of destroying its existing government yet without a serious strategy for providing security thereafter defies logic and falls short of proper professional military standards of competence. It was in fact unconscionable.

Lest there be any doubt about the absence of a plan, one need only consult the Third Infantry Division's after-action report, which reads: "Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance." A broader Department of Defense report on the war similarly observed that "late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination.""

Or this?

"In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided.""

Or this Powerpoint slide showing how reconstruction was supposed to work?

If the President is so convinced that we shouldn't vote for people who don't see the importance of having a plan for Iraq, why isn't that a reason for him to fire Donald Rumsfeld, replace Dick Cheney with General Shinseki or one of the many other people who were warning about the need for planning before the invasion, resign the Presidency, and start working against all the Congressional Republicans who enabled him and his administration to invade Iraq without having a plan for the reconstruction? Why should we vote for a party that presided over one of the most astonishing failures of military planning in our history?

This administration's lack of planning is one of the most important reasons why we are in the situation we're in in Iraq: watching the country descend into chaos and civil war, with no obvious way of turning the situation around. Back when there was a lot more reason to hope that with a good plan, we could bring security to Iraq and leave a peaceful and stable country behind us, George W. Bush and his administration didn't seem to think that winning in Iraq was important enough to plan for. It takes a lot of gall for them to turn around and accuse the Democrats of not having a plan for victory in Iraq.

The war in Iraq is probably unwinnable now. The best we can hope for is to stave off complete catastrophe. No one who thinks that the consequences of losing are likely to be very serious should forget who got us to this point. And no one who does not forget that is likely to vote for Bush because he's so very good at planning.

More Fun From The Party Of Moral Values

by hilzoy

Josh Marshall has been reporting a new and despicable set of dirty tricks: robocalls that call over and over, or in the middle of the night, pretending to be for one candidate when in fact they are from another. The point, apparently, is to annoy voters so much that they decide not to vote for the candidate they (mistakenly) think is making the calls. One example from the Philadelphia daily News:

"BEING SICK in bed, which I was for the past couple of weeks, is bad enough.

But being sick in bed while living in a political combat zone - in this case, the 6th Congressional District - is enough to MAKE YOU WANT TO KILL SOMEBODY.

My God, the phone calls! Just as I'd begin to drift off to sleep, the phone would ring and it would be YET ANOTHER DAMN COMPUTERIZED MESSAGE ABOUT LOIS MURPHY.

One, two, three, four times a day it seemed, the phone rang with "robocalls" about the Democratic challenger to incumbent GOP Rep. Jim Gerlach in one of the nastiest races in the country.

I never listened to one word of it, just slammed the phone down and seethed with resentment. (...)

But if they annoy voters rather than enlighten them, what's the point?

That's what I asked Lois Murphy's campaign yesterday.

The answer was simple:

"It's not us!"

Only three recorded calls have been made on behalf of Murphy's campaign, including one from Gov. Rendell, which were sponsored by the Democratic State Committee.

The rest? A "dirty trick" by the Republicans, said communications director Amy Bonitatibus.

The calls, which begin by offering "important information about Lois Murphy," are designed to mislead voters into thinking the message is from her.

Most recipients slam down the phone before finding out otherwise - and then call to complain.

"We've got a ton of complaints, starting about two weeks ago," Bonitatibus said.

"Some of our biggest supporters have said, 'If you call me again, I'm not voting for Lois.' ""

Josh Marshall has more examples: New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Kansas, and others. Most of them seem to be funded by the National Republican Congressional Committee:

"In at least 53 competitive House races, the National Republican Campaign Committee has launched hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls, known as "robo calls." (...)

The NRCC, the GOP campaign arm for House candidates, has spent $2.1 million on such automated calls nationwide. In Illinois, at least three versions of a phone message target Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat in a tight Chicago-area race, and her positions on taxes, Social Security and immigrants."

And then there are the push polls. From the NYT:

"An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who “push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy” should be controlled. If your reply is “yes,” the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists “the same legal rights and privileges” as Americans.

Using a telemarketing tactic that is best known for steering consumers to buy products, the organizers of the political telephone calls say they have reached hundreds of thousands of homes in five states over the last several weeks in a push to win votes for Republicans."

Luckily, in addition to doing the reporting, TPM has also provided an email from a reader that states my views so well that it would be pointless for me to try to think of a better way to say it:

"I think it's useful to take a step back and examine, in the simplest terms, what the Republicans are doing here: they are attempting to sabotage the American democratic process because it's inconvenient for their candidates.

Of course these robo-calls are only one manifestation of a consistent theme, but when I approach the calls without the cynicism of a political news junkie, I find them breathtakingly despicable. The people behind this aren't schoolyard bullies, or even college kids. These are adults with years of political experience and a comprehensive understanding of what exactly their acts amount to. The NRCC simply does not believe that Americans should be able to make informed choices about their representatives in the voting booth. They are perfectly willing to dismantle the democratic process, which cannot function properly when voters are harassed (or even worse, harassed under false pretenses). I think it's fair to say that their behavior in this instance is "profoundly immoral and malevolent," which is how the Oxford English Dictionary describes "evil." Despite our desensitization to these types of transgressions, we cannot afford to take them lightly."

The people who do this are antidemocratic. They don't believe in making their case and letting the voters decide. They don't care about democracy, or citizens' right to choose the candidate who best reflects their views, or fair play or honesty or decency or moral values. They care about power, and they will undermine our democracy before they let the voters pry the reins of power out of their claws.

Saddam Will Hang

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was found guilty by a special tribunal Sunday of crimes against humanity for the torture and execution of more than 100 people from a small town north of Baghdad 24 years ago. He was sentenced to death by hanging."

I oppose the death penalty. That said, there are cases in which I get more upset than others, and Saddam is somewhere around Jeffrey Dahmer's level on my personal list of death sentences to protest. Rather than say anything about the trial, I thought I'd take this opportunity to remember some other people who were sentenced to death. [UPDATE: These are not the people he was just convicted of killing. I just thought I would rather think about Saddam Hussein's victims than think about him. END UPDATE.]

[UPDATE: While I wrote this I was only thinking about Iraq, not about the US. So let me state for the record: I don't think that the dreadfulness of Saddam in any way implies that the invasion was justified, let alone that it was justified as actually executed. Our invasion has had horrible consequences for a lot of people, American and Iraqi, and will continue to have horrible repercussions for years to come. There were a lot of other things we could have done to help, things that would not have left hundreds of thousands dead and a country torn apart. We could, for starters, have actually done something to protest the Anfal campaign when it happened, or done more in Darfur today. By invading Iraq, we removed Saddam, but we also heaped more misery on the Iraqi people, who have surely suffered enough already. END UPDATE.]

More Incompetence, Plus Reading Comprehension Exercise

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence."

Great. Just great. I can't think of what to say about this administration's lack of commitment to keeping us safe that I haven't already said. They have done astonishingly little on securing Russian loose nukes, preventing nuclear proliferation, trying to ramp down the nuclear programs that already exist; and now it turns out that they're posting information about how to make nuclear weapons on their web sites. And that's just their record on nuclear issues; we haven't gotten to security at chemical plants, on rail lines, and so on.

Thanks, guys.

Now for the reading comprehension bit. Consider this paragraph from the NYT article:

"Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away."

This is clumsily written: the phrase 'at the time' could, in theory, refer either to 'in the 1990s and in 2002', or 'after the Persian Gulf war', i.e. in 1991. In context, however, it seems pretty clear that it means 'in 1991' -- for one thing, only this reading fits with the Times' other descriptions of the documents (e.g., as being "detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war" (emphasis added). For another, if the Times really were reporting that Saddam was only a year away from making a bomb during the 1990s, and then (oddly) again in 2002, you'd expect this to be at the top of the story, not buried in a throwaway line, whereas if it was just repeating something that was in fact said in the second paragraph, then there's no puzzle here.

In any case, I expect that the Timess will clarify things soon enough, since even though the Corner notes the ambiguity about 'at the time', some others aren't being nearly so careful, and seem to be leaping to the conclusion that Iraq was a year away from making a nuclear weapon in 2002.

For the record: it has been known since sometime fairly shortly after the first Gulf War that before the 1991 Gulf War Saddam was roughly a year away from making a nuclear weapon. But we basically destroyed that program, and sanctions and inspections kept it from being started up again, though I imagine Saddam Hussein always had hopes of doing so. See, for instance, here, here , and here, for starters. The fact that Saddam had an advanced nuclear weapons program in 1991 is not news.