Obsidian Wings

Mayer's New Yorker Article

by hilzoy

Jane Mayer has an extraordinary article in the New Yorker today. It's on the efforts of Alberto J. Mora, then the general counsel of the Navy, to work against the interrogation policies detailed in the various 'torture memos'. It's worth reading in its entirety, and I won't try to summarize it. I will, however, highlight a few themes below the fold.

Congress: Do Your Job

by hilzoy

Regardless of where you stand on the NSA wiretap issue, it's a matter that cries out for Congressional hearings. It concerns important constitutional principles -- the rule of law, the separation of powers, and of course the fourth amendment. The best you can say about its legality is that it's debatable. And a failure to inquire into it would leave unchallenged the idea that the President can do what he likes without bothering to tell anyone, except for a few members of Congress sworn to absolute secrecy.

One of the committees best suited to hold such hearings is the Intelligence Committee. Its members know a lot of classified information, and are therefore in a good position to assess the administration's claims. Moreover, they have a reputation for discretion. And yet it's still completely unclear whether or not Congress will hold any. This is largely due to its chairman, Pat Roberts, whose hometown newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, just wrote (h/t War and Piece):

"Roberts seems prepared to write the Bush team a series of blank checks to conduct the war on terror, even to the point of ignoring policy mistakes and possible violations of law.

That's not oversight -- it's looking the other way."

According to the Washington Post, last week Jay Rockefeller introduced a motion to hold hearings. The White House put pressure on committee members, but after a counterproductive call from Andy Card to Sen. Olympia Snowe,

"Snowe contacted fellow committee Republican Chuck Hagel (Neb.), who also had voiced concerns about the program. They arranged a three-way phone conversation with Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).

Until then, Roberts apparently thought he had the votes to defeat Rockefeller's motion in the committee, which Republicans control nine to seven, the sources said. But Snowe and Hagel told the chairman that if he called up the motion, they would support it, assuring its passage, the sources said.

When the closed meeting began, Roberts averted a vote on Rockefeller's motion by arranging for a party-line vote to adjourn until March 7. The move infuriated Rockefeller, who told reporters, "The White House has applied heavy pressure in recent weeks to prevent the committee from doing its job.""

Pressure indeed.

Historical Revisionism

by hilzoy

Glenn Greenwald has written another great post (actually, a lot of them, but this is the one I'm writing about.) He's writing in response to a post by Captain Ed, who claims that "FISA came into being to regulate peacetime surveillance by the federal government, as an antidote to Nixonian abuses of power that had nothing to do with the conduct of war." Greenwald notes that that's not true, since FISA contains an entire section called "Authorization during time of war"; and since it was passed in response to Nixon's spying during the Vietnam war, not during peacetime. (In an update, Captain Ed acknowledges this.)

But Greenwald then adds this:

"But beyond these self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’s argument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful, enemy-less, utopian era which no longer exists.

This world-view is staggering in its revisionism. FISA was enacted in 1978. I did not think there were many people, if there were any at all, who actually believe that 1978 was a time of "peace." Most people -- and I would have thought this was true particularly for "conservatives" -- tend to see that period as the height of a war which we call the "Cold War," where we faced an "Evil Empire" trying to achieve world domination in order to impose its tyrannical ideology. In fact, we spent the entire decade after the enactment of FISA engaged in a massive build-up of our military forces, and we even tried to find a way to build a space-based shield around our country in order to repel incoming missiles. Accordingly, how can it possibly be argued that Americans banned our Government from eavesdropping on us in secret only during times of peace?"

This is true, and it's important. I was thinking of it a few weeks ago. I was eating lunch, turned on CSPAN, and as luck would have it, a speech by President Bush was on. I usually find the President's speeches unwatchable, since they consist of sentences like "You know, what some people don't understand is, our enemies are really bad people." But on this occasion, for whatever reason, I watched it. And what struck me was that if I had no knowledge whatsoever of current events -- if, for instance, I had just beamed in from another galaxy -- he might sound persuasive. As it was, though, it was so completely detached from reality that it was downright surreal. And so I kept listening, in wonderment, as this speech appropriate to another world entirely moved from one bizarre claim to another, leaving me wondering whether it was me or the President who had gone through the looking glass.

And what started me wondering was this statement:

"You know, a lot of us grew up thinking that oceans would protect us; that if there was a threat overseas, it really didn't concern us because we were safe. That's what history had basically told us -- yes, there was an attack on Pearl Harbor, obviously, but it was a kind of hit-and-run and then we pursued the enemy. A lot of folks -- at least, my age, when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked. And in that we got attacked, I vowed then, like I'm vowing to you today, that I understand my most important priority. My most important job is to protect the security of the American people."

Just savor this bit: "when I was going to college, I never dreamed that the United States of America could be attacked."

That just can't be true.

An Easy Way To Do Good

by hilzoy

Via Nathan Newman at TPMCafe: Unite Here is launching a campaign to raise wages of hotel workers in upcoming contract talks. These are good times for hotels: according to the Wall Street Journal (12/8/05; sorry, subscription required):

"Despite a flurry of devastating hurricanes as well as higher prices for gasoline and airline tickets, the hotel industry is set to post record profit this year followed by at least two more years of solid growth, an industry report predicted.

Robust business and leisure travel, combined with slow construction of new hotels, have given hotel operators vast pricing power and allowed owners to reinvest capital in their properties, according to the report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers' hospitality-and-leisure practice, set for release today. (...)

The industry is expected to earn $20.8 billion before taxes this year, nearly a 25% increase over last year, PricewaterhouseCoopers said. It expects growth to remain strong but to slow to about 21% next year and about 18% in 2007.

"The last two years were extraordinary," said Bjorn Hanson, managing partner of the firm's leisure practice. "Though 2006's growth won't be as high, we usually don't have three years where we have the combination of rate and occupancy growth that we have right now." Increases in nightly rates, especially in the upper echelon of hotels, have driven the industry's success, he added."

Times are not so good for the people who leave the little mints on pillows, though. According to Unite Here (pdf), the average wage for housekeepers is $8.67 an hour, which comes to an annual wage of $17,340. (The poverty level for a family of four was $19,307 in 2004.) I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to check their figures; I couldn't find them (the site is pretty complicated, and there are a number of different wage reports), but I did find this (pdf): it lists the average wage for "maids and housemen" as $8.34 an hour. (I believe this excludes people employed in private households.)

Cleaning hotel rooms is hard work, even if you don't stop to think about the various unsavory messes left by inconsiderate guests. And $17,340 a year is a pitifully small amount of money. (Just try to imagine raising kids on that.) The average union wage is $13 an hour, which comes to $26,000 a year. That's hardly princely, but it's a lot more than non-union housekeepers make; and it makes a huge difference.

Unite Here has made it easy for those of us who travel for business or pleasure to support them. Here's a page that lets you find union hotels, and here's another that lists hotels currently under boycott. Bookmark these pages and use them: going to hotels that are unionized is a simple way to make the world a better place for people who work hard every day, and who deserve to make enough to raise them above the poverty line. And if every business traveller who thought that hotel workers should be paid a decent wage acted on that preference, hotel workers' wages would rise really quickly. This is a very, very easy way to do good for people who deserve it.

You can also sign up to support the campaign here.)

Some of our conservative readers might balk at this. I don't think they should. The driving force behind market economics is people deciding what to buy or sell, and to whom, depending on what they want out of the transaction. One of the beauties of a market economy is that it is generally a very good way of transmitting information about consumer preferences to producers. It's easy for consumers to make some of their preferences known: people tend to prefer fresh to rotten produce, and as a result we do not see displays of decomposing fruits and vegetables when we go to the supermarket.

Other preferences, however, are harder to act on. Most of us have preferences that relate to values: given the choice, for instance, I would rather pay more for something that was produced by salaried workers than pay less for one that was produced by slave labor. However, information about how to act on some of these preferences is hard to come by. If you think that being unionized either leads to higher wages or is a good proxy for them, and you prefer to patronize hotels that pay their workers a decent wage, then the Unite Here page is a way of allowing you, the consumer, to make your preferences heard, thereby correcting a market failure.

And if any of our conservative readers have problems with unions generally, ask yourself whether those problems affect this case. I, for instance, have seen enough mean, arbitrary, and crazy bosses to appreciate the need for some organized way to counteract them, but I have also known people who were unable to fire genuinely incompetent people because of union grievance procedures.

It might be tricky to decide, in some cases, whether the protection from mean or crazy supervisors outweighs the increased difficulty of firing people who are unwilling or unable to do their jobs. However, it's easiest to make this argument against unions when you're talking about professions in which there are large differences in talent or competence, and in which a lot turns on having the right people in place. (Teachers, for instance.) But it's hard to see that it works in the case of the people who clean hotels.

On the one hand, problems with a hotel worker's job performance are comparatively easy to document clearly, so if someone is not doing his or her job, that fact will be pretty easy to demonstrate. (In this respect, they are very different from teachers: what makes a good teacher is often a matter of judgment, while what makes a person who cleans hotel rooms bad at her job can often be illustrated with photographs.) On the other, since hotel work requires no training and has very little prestige, hotel workers are likely to be at the mercy of their supervisors to a much greater degree than workers like teachers.

A union is just an organization that allows workers to bargain with employers as a unit, thereby giving them more power than they would have as individuals. If a given union is corrupt or in some way counterproductive, then so be it. But hotel workers would seem to me to be exactly the sort of case in which collective bargaining makes the most sense.

Africa, Liberalization and the West

by Charles

There was a really good dKos diary on Africa, but my computer automatically updated Windows and re-booted, and it was lost it before I could bookmark it. Dang it! I tried to find it and failed, not realizing there are around 200 dKos diaries posted every day, and that dKos has a clunky search function. Oh, well. Another good work into oblivion. Too bad, because it was a gold nugget in a morass of angry partisanship.  [Update:  Tim found the link (thanks), and more narrative is below the fold at the end.]

A few days ago, economics professor William Easterly wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled The West Can't Save Africa. More accurately, western governments can't send money to African governments and expect problems to be solved. Easterly makes the case that individual Africans, with the help of accountable non-governmental aid organizations, can make significant improvements to their environs. His more expanded thesis here. An excerpt:

Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is only one major area of the world in which central planning is still seen as a way to achieve prosperity – countries that receive foreign aid. Behind the Aid Wall that divides poor countries from rich, the aid community is awash in plans, strategies, and frameworks to meet the very real needs of the world’s poor. These exercises only make sense in a central planning mentality in which the answer to the tragedies of poverty is a large bureaucratic apparatus to dictate quantities of different development goods and services by administrative fiat. The planning mindset is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a "poverty trap," which can only be alleviated by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a "financing gap" for poor countries. The aid inflow is of course administered by this same planning apparatus.

This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by "searchers", both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way. Examples of searchers are firms in private markets and democratically accountable politicians. There is a robust correlation (0.73) between economic and political freedom, on one hand, and economic development, on the other hand.

To describe why centralized aid plans (such as proposed by Jeffrey Sachs) don't and won't work, Larry White uses the Underpants Gnomes analogy, courtesy of South Park.

Gnomes Business Plan
Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit

Sachs Africa Plan
Phase 1: US taxpayers give (more) money to sub-Saharan African governments or multinational aid agencies, "directed to specific needs".
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Africa embarks on cumulative growth.

Maher Arar's Case Dismissed

by hilzoy

Maher Arar's case has been dismissed. You can read Katherine's summary of the case here, a press release from Arar's attorneys here, and the decision itself here (pdf).

I've read the decision, but do not feel competent to address the legal issues it raises. (Most of them involve things like jurisdiction and standing.) However, there is one point on which I disagree strongly with the Court. Apparently, one of the counts could have proceeded had the Court not found that the national security questions it raises require that it be deferred to Congress or the executive. The courts, according to the decision, lack the foreign policy expertise to decide such questions, and therefore they should be left to the "political branches" of the government.

I think this is just wrong. Article VI of the Constitution states that "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby". We have entered into the Convention Against Torture. Article III of that Convention states that "No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture." There are very substantial grounds for believing that someone rendered to Syria, as Arar was, would be tortured, even leaving aside the possibility that we asked the Syrians to torture him. We have therefore violated one of those treaties which are, according to the Constitution, the law of the land.

This means that the extradition of Maher Arar is a violation of the law. It may also have foreign policy implications, but it does not thereby cease to be a violation of the law. And while conducting foreign policy may not fall within normal judicial expertise, reading laws, and determining whether the facts in evidence warrant conviction under them, is exactly what judges do. If determining when conduct violates a law and when it does not does not fall within their purview, I have no idea why on earth we bother to have them.

Moreover, while the Court argues that Congress has not addressed the issue of extraordinary rendition, I would have thought that it did so by ratifying the Convention Against Torture, thereby making it the law of the land.

The only way I can see of holding that Maher Arar's detention should not be justiciable is to say that when something is both (a) a violation of law and (b) significant for foreign policy, its foreign policy significance should trump its illegality. But this would be crazy. Do we really want to say that whenever foreign policy is in any way involved, our laws cease to apply? That whatever our officials do that relates to foreign policy is therefore immune to legal scrutiny? I don't.

The Court also makes much of various prudential arguments against the courts' considering issues that bear on foreign policy. But there are, I think, compelling prudential arguments on the other side as well. For one thing, treaties are not just vague gestures in the general direction of an intention; they are legally binding documents, and should be treated as such. When a treaty specifically outlaws certain forms of conduct, and our government engages in them anyways, our word as a nation is at stake. It would be nice to think that no administration would ever choose to ignore treaties, but Maher Arar's case is itself evidence that sometimes they do.

If there is no way of holding officials accountable under treaties (which almost by definition involve "foreign policy considerations"), then nothing prevents administrations from treating treaties as worthless scraps of paper. There are, it seems to me, very strong prudential arguments against allowing this to happen. And the courts would not be intruding where they do not belong: as I've said, according to the Constitution, treaties are law, and so in adopting a treaty, the Congress is making the conduct they preclude the courts' business.

That someone on a stopover in an airport can be detained by our government, sent to Syria to be tortured, held for ten months, and be left without any legal recourse is unconscionable. Coming just after the Abu Ghraib photos, it leaves me speechless.

A Call To Greatness!

by hilzoy

Kevin Drum notes this passage from the President's health care speech yesterday, in which the President spells out some of the benefits of his new Health Savings Accounts:

"The traditional insurance today will cover your health care costs -- most of your health care costs -- in exchange for a high premium payment up front. The costs are generally shared by you and your employer. You may also pay a small deductible and co-payment at the time of treatment. What's interesting about this system is that those payments cover only a fraction of the actual costs of health care, the rest of which are picked up by a third party, basically your insurance company.

It means most Americans have no idea what their actual cost of treatment is. You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there's no reason at all to kind of worry about price. If somebody else is paying the bill, you just kind of -- hey, it seems like a pretty good deal. There's no pressure for an industry to lower price. And so what you're seeing is price going up. If you don't care what you're paying, and the provider doesn't have any incentive to lower, the natural inclination is for the cost to go up and the insurance companies, sure enough, pass on the costs -- the increase in cost to you and your employer. That's what's happening. (...)

For many routine medical needs, HSAs mean you can shop around until you get the best treatment for the best price. In other words, it's your money; you're responsible for routine medical expenses; the insurance pays for the catastrophic care. You're responsible for paying for the portion of your health care costs up to your deductible. And so you -- you talk to your doctor, you say, can't we find this drug at a little cheaper cost? Or you go to a specialist, maybe we can do this a little better -- old Joe does it for X, I'm going -- why don't you try it for Y? It allows you to choose treatment or tests that meet your needs in a way that you're comfortable with when it comes to paying the bills. In other words, decisions about routine medical treatments are made by you and the doc, not by third-party people that you never know. And all of a sudden, when you inject this type of thinking in the system, price starts to matter. You're aware of price. You begin to say, well, maybe there's a better way to do this, and more cost-effective way."

My sentiments exactly. Just the other day I was beset by a hollow, empty feeling, and I said to myself: Self, there's a void in my life -- a void that could only be filled by spending hours calling around, comparing prices for doctors' visits and pharmaceuticals, preferably while sick. Oh, if only I could say to my doctor: Maybe we can do this a little better -- old Joe does it for X, I'm going -- why don't you try it for Y?

You see, shopping for medical services isn't like ordinary shopping. When you go to the grocery store, for instance, they make it easy for you. There are the boxes of cereal all lined up, awaiting your inspection, and all you need to do is compare the price, the percentage of your daily vitamin needs provided by one carefully measured serving, and so on, and then make your selection. Where's the fun in that? Shopping for medical services is different: hours spent finding and tracking down the relevant physicians and getting through their daunting office staff; price discussions with hospital administrators who don't want to tell you exactly how much anaesthesia you'll need without an exam, and so forth. The thrill of the chase! The call of the wild! By comparison, ordinary shopping is a tame and pitiful facsimile, like shooting cage-raised quail when you could be hunting grizzlies.

You might be thinking: silly hilzoy! You can do this already! But that just shows how little you know about the thrills of shopping for medical services. It's just no fun without a little skin in the game: the sort of skin that you only have if your medical insurance won't cover your bills. And that's what Bush is offering us: the chance to have the shopping experience of a lifetime, and to have it under the most deliciously grueling conditions: with our own dollars on the line, when we're desperately ill. It's a vision as bold and rugged as America herself; and that's why we love our President.

***

Obviously, though, Bush wasn't designing this solely for our enjoyment. He claims to be motivated by a desire to cut health care costs. There's only one problem: HSAs would have a negligible impact on health care costs. To show you why, I'm going to reprint a graph I made up last time I wrote about HSAs. It's based on 2002 data from this Kaiser Family Foundation report (see exhibit 1.11.) It shows what percentage of our health care spending is done by those who spend the most.

HSAs cover medical expenses above a certain limit, often around $5,000. Pretty much everyone in the top 50% of spenders on health care will have reached that limit. (My health care spending hit five figures in the first five days of this year, and I'm not even especially sick.) That means that any reduction in health care spending will come from that tiny little blip on the right hand side of the graph: the 50% of the public that spends least on health care. Since that part of the public accounts for only a tiny part of health care spending (3.4% in 2002), most health economists don't think HSAs will actually save all that much.

They will, however, have other dreadful effects, which I wrote about here and here. The most important one is to gut the present system of health insurance. Moreover, a new study by Jonathan Gruber shows the following:

"I estimate that the President’s budget proposals will cost almost $12 billion dollars per year if fully phased in.  I estimate that these proposals will on net raise the number of uninsured (by 600,000 persons), as those left uninsured through firm dropping of insurance exceed those who gain insurance through taking up tax-subsidized high-deductible plans attached to HSAs."

I can hear the nay-sayers among you grumbling that in a time of exploding budget deficits, twelve billion dollars seems like an awful lot of money to pay to strip health insurance away from six hundred thousand people, and leave many more underinsured, especially since anyone who wants to be uninsured can just cancel her insurance policy. But that just misses the point. In the immortal words of Rousseau, sometimes we must be "forced to be free" -- in this case, free of health insurance, which enslaves the mind, degrades the spirit, and deprives us of the ennobling experience of shopping for medical services without a safety net.

This, then, is the inspiring vision to which our President calls us: to expand the liberties our forefathers gave us beyond freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, to one of the noblest freedoms of all: the freedom to confront medical bills alone, in fear and trembling, without the false comfort of medical insurance, with only our own wits standing between us and personal bankruptcy.

More Abu Ghraib Photos

by hilzoy

Salon has them. The article is here; the photos are here. (h/t matttbastard ) From the article:

"The DVD containing the material includes a June 6, 2004, CID investigation report written by Special Agent James E. Seigmund. That report includes the following summary of the material included: "A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts."

The photographs we are showing in the accompanying gallery represent a small fraction of these visual materials. None, as far as we know, have been published elsewhere. They include: a naked, handcuffed prisoner in a contorted position; a dead prisoner who had been severely beaten; a prisoner apparently sodomizing himself with an object; and a naked, hooded prisoner standing next to an American officer who is blandly writing a report against a wall. Other photographs depict a bloody cell.

The DVD also includes photographs of guards threatening Iraqi prisoners with dogs, homemade videotapes depicting hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate, and a video showing a mentally disturbed prisoner smashing his head against a door. Oddly, the material also includes numerous photographs of slaughtered animals and mundane images of soldiers traveling around Iraq."

1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse. I feel sick.

About publishing these photos and linking to them: I would not publish inflammatory images if I thought that they were inflammatory because they might lead people to jump to erroneous conclusions. For instance, if a prisoner had had first a bad fall (and assume for now that I know that this is true), and then an accident while peeling potatoes, and someone had taken a photo of him bruised and covered in blood and surrounded by GIs, that would be a case for exercising editorial restraint. The natural conclusion to jump to after seeing such an image is that the prisoner has been beaten; if people leap to that conclusion, it could cause real problems; I know that conclusion to be false; and besides, in this case the picture has no real news value.

It's a different matter entirely when a picture is inflammatory because what it depicts is genuinely outrageous. In this case, not running it because of its inflammatory nature is, basically, saying: the truth might legitimately inflame people, and for that reason we are going to withhold it. Not having canvassed all the possibilities in my mind, I don't want to say that this line of argument should never be used by the press, or bloggers (being a philosopher, I naturally think of extreme counterexamples), but it's a line of thought that any news organization should be wary of. Their job, after all, is to present the news that people find important, not to stage-manage the reactions of their public. They do (imho) have the right to make judgments of taste, etc., and they are obviously not under the obligation to publish every true thing they discover, but when something is inflammatory, it has presumably met the threshold of being of interest to the public, and thus there's a presumption in favor of publishing it. (Note: I am talking here about photos and factual reporting; not about editorials and, um, cartoons, which are different.)

Moreover, the last people in the world who should be urging caution on the press are those who are responsible for the original outrage. They had it in their power not to act outrageously in the first place. They acted outrageously anyways. For them to ask the press not to publish it is, basically, to ask that the press refrain from doing its job because they failed to do theirs. It's also a request that they be allowed to continue to perpetrate outrages with impunity. As I wrote earlier, it would be crazy if every time someone did something awful, they had the right to ask the press to help conceal their misdeeds in order not to spur outrage.

We need to know what is being done in our name. Those who put in place the policies that allowed this to happen should have considered the consequences beforehand. The fact that they did not should shame them; it is not a reason for the press not to do its job.

Poor, poor, pitiful Haiti gets a small break

by Charles

The words chaos and violence never seem far when the topic is Haiti.  The latest election--conducted on February 7th, the first national election in years--was a positive step toward bringing representative government to the beleaguered half-island nation.  Over the weekend, it looked like Rene Preval had enough votes to be elected outright.  Then, as more returns came in, the percentage of votes in his favor dropped below fifty percent of overall count, which would trigger a runoff in March.  This morning, Preval was declared the winner by the interim government, according to AP.  Whew.  Had this not happened, more violence and chaos would have been likely.

Preval will have the help of 9,400 UN peacekeepers and a few hundred million bucks from international donors to start his administration.  The Miami Herald has a bio on Preval here, and he looks to be a consensus-building type who will refrain from resorting to Aristide's dictatorial tactics.

Election aside, the dismal events over the two or three years could have been mostly avoided.  The New York Times has a lengthy piece on the "mixed signals" the Bush administration sent to Haiti, and it looks a U.S.-funded NGO, the International Republican Institute, was working at cross purposes with the resident U.S. ambassador, Clinton-appointee Dean Curran (the IRI response here).  Post-Aristide, the U.S. went from mixed signals to passing the buck, prematurely assigning peacekeeping functions to an ineffectual UN contingent.  The New York Times:

Those hopes have fallen short at nearly every turn, and for reasons that go beyond Haiti's desperate poverty. The interim government is widely viewed as politicized and inept. The local and international security forces are undermanned and overmatched by the proliferation of guns and drugs. The United States, which sent in troops to help stabilize the country immediately after Mr. Aristide's ouster, pulled them out several months later, even though they command unparalleled respect in Haiti.

Not to mention that Haiti has no standing army.  Preval didn't distinguish himself in his previous run as president, but here's hoping he does it this time wisely and well.

A City On A Hill

by hilzoy

John Winthrop (wonderful original spelling here):

"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. (...) For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

(...) "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it."

Sydney Morning Herald:

"MORE photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. (...)

Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets."

One is below the fold.