Gay marriage opponents to rally in Calif. after hundreds march in support of same-sex couples
By GARANCE BURKE
Copyright 2009 Associated Press
6:26 AM CDT, May 31, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-ap-us-gay-marriage,0,5810976.story
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Hundreds of gay marriage supporters marched in rural, conservative California, but before the dusty roads could clear, opponents of same-sex couples planned to take to the streets to renew their resolve.
The outfits that helped persuade voters to ban gay marriage in the state Constitution in November will on Sunday celebrate weddings between men and women at Fresno City Hall, while nearly a dozen religious and social conservative groups planned a similar rally in San Diego.
Just a day earlier, gay marriage advocates marched along dusty roads, saying they wouldn't be dissuaded the state Supreme Court's decision to uphold Proposition 8, which enshrined the ban on gay marriage in the state Constitution.
The gay marriage supporters pledge to put a new initiative before voters to overturn the ban — perhaps as soon as next year — and to take their message to Washington in October.
California Court upholds Prop. 8 gay marriage ban but 18,000 couples remain wed
But there were skeptical residents, some of whom showed up Saturday just to see what all the commotion was about.
Tom Johnson, 57, a disabled Vietnam veteran from Clovis, a Fresno suburb, said voters already made their choice.
"I'm against people coming into our community with those viewpoints. I just can't accept it," Johnson said. "People already voted yes on Prop. 8. That's the law and we should follow it."
The event attracted veteran activists and celebrities, including Academy Award-winning actress Charlize Theron and Eric McCormack. It was organized by a lesbian mother in Fresno who was removed from the parent-teacher association at her son's Catholic school after she spoke out against banning same-sex weddings.
"Fresno represents middle America values, and we can start changing our neighbors' feelings about gay marriage beginning right here in the Central Valley," said lead organizer Robin McGehee, a 36-year-old college professor who married her longtime partner last year. "We're doing exactly what the freedom riders would do in the South in the 1960s, which is reaching into communities that are different from us so we can all live in equality."
Paying homage to the 1965 marches in Selma, Ala., that marked the peak of the civil rights movement, the "Meet in the Middle 4 Equality" protest began Saturday morning in Selma, Calif., the self-proclaimed raisin capital of the world.
Hundreds of spirited marchers were escorted by the California Highway Patrol along an aging highway to Fresno, a city of more than 450,000 and the largest in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. On the lawn adjacent to City Hall, organizers flew a massive rainbow flag on loan from San Francisco's Castro District, the nexus of the city's gay and lesbian community.
Some wore wedding dresses or carried rainbow flags, a symbol of support for gay rights.
Many gay activists now believe their campaign against Proposition 8 focused too much on liberal urban enclaves along the coast, failing even to reach out to the state's rural regions. The measure passed with nearly 69 percent of the vote in Fresno County, compared to 52 percent statewide.
"We aren't here to impose our beliefs on anyone. We are here to begin a dialogue on civil rights," said Cleve Jones, a pioneer activist and protege of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay leader who was slain in 1978. "Harvey said we can't win unless we open up our hearts to connecting with people who appear to be very different from us."
The campaign's next phase will train thousands of volunteers and faith leaders to canvass door-to-door to talk about the issue with neighbors, said Rick Jacobs, chair of the Courage Campaign. Representatives from all 50 states will march on Washington on October 11 to coincide with National Coming Out Day, Jacobs said.
"We're not doing what we used to do, which is meet in West Hollywood," Jacobs said. "We want people from all 435 congressional districts to tell their stories in Washington."
Sunday, May 31, 2009
A Red State Booster Shot
A Red State Booster Shot
By Alec MacGillis
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901548.html
Those in the red states still smarting over Barack Obama's election victory can perhaps take solace in this: The Democrats' No. 1 domestic policy initiative, universal health care, is likely to help red America at the expense of blue.
Health-care reform may be overdue in a country with 45 million uninsured and soaring medical costs, but it will also represent a substantial wealth transfer from the North and the East to the South and the West. The Northeast and the Midwest have much higher rates of coverage than the rest of the country, led by Massachusetts, where all but 3 percent of residents are insured. The disproportionate share of uninsured is in the South and the West, the result of employment patterns, weak unions and stingy state governments. Texas leads the way, with a quarter of its population uninsured; it would be at the top even without its many illegal immigrants.
Then there is the matter of paying for universal health care. The plan picking up steam on Capitol Hill is to cover much of the $1.2 trillion cost over 10 years by taxing employer-provided health benefits. And who has the highest benefits? People in the North and the East, thanks to pricier health care markets, higher state standards for health coverage and stronger labor unions. Depending on how such a tax were designed, it could land hard not only on corporate executives but also on union workers whose compensation gains show up as health benefits instead of wages.
It would not be the first time that the historically more affluent part of the country has subsidized the less prosperous one. Long before jobs flowed to Mexico and China, they flowed from Massachusetts and Michigan to North Carolina and Tennessee, where unions were weaker and employers could pay less and provide fewer benefits.
The people followed, moving to a Sun Belt where taxes were lower because states offered less in the way of safety nets -- nets that the North and the East will now pay to stitch up via universal health care.
"The cost of health care benefits was very much a factor in plant relocations in the eighties," said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "And now we end up paying for [Sun Belt health care] anyway? It's incredible."
So far, though, the health-care debate is not talked about much in regional terms. In the fight over regulating carbon emissions, regional self-interest is plain, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers from coal-dependent Midwestern and Southern states trying to blunt the legislation. But pushing universal health care are Northeasterners such as Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer, and pushing against it are Sun Belters such as John Cornyn and Jon Kyl.
It is a rare triumph of principle over parochialism -- or maybe no one is looking at the numbers.
Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans lack health insurance. But in the North, many states in addition to Massachusetts have less than 11 percent uninsured. They include Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the South and the West, where small businesses dominate, many states other than Texas have more than 17 percent, including Arizona, Florida, California, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nevada and New Mexico.
The disparities extend to the value of employer-provided benefits. It is highest in the Northeast and the Midwest, lowest in the South and the West.
That means a big regional slant if the plan raises money by ending the tax exemption for employer health benefits or by taxing the value of above-average benefits, which is what Congress is leaning toward. Critics have long argued that exempting employer-provided benefits from taxes is unfair to self-insured people who have to use after-tax dollars to buy coverage, and that the exemption drives health costs higher by encouraging generous benefits plans.
But opponents of taxing health benefits say that it would hit many middle-class families whose packages are worth more than average simply because they live in high-cost markets. They argue that much of the Northeast has high health-care costs partly because the cost of living there is high, not because medical spending is out of control. Indeed, when it comes to Medicare spending, some of the top spending areas are in the South and the West, such as Miami and McAllen, Tex., while some of the most efficient areas are in the North. Better, some say, to raise revenue through other routes -- reducing tax deductions for the wealthy, taxing sugary sodas, raising the capital gains tax or expanding the Medicare tax to unearned income.
"There's a big regional backdrop to this," said Harvard health policy professor Robert Blendon. "Those who are the beneficiaries of all this money that's going to be floating around is one group of states, and who's going to have to pay for the taxes if they lift this exemption is another group."
For example, he said, if you're a New York policeman married to a nurse and your combined salaries are $80,000, your health insurance will be taxed to pay for a family in Mississippi. "I'm trying to figure out how Chuck Schumer can raise his hands and say this is a good thing if New York workers are going to be such losers based on taxes," he said.
Now, if national reform really does restrain health-care costs over the long run, it would help employers and consumers in the Northeast and the Midwest just as it would those elsewhere. And to lessen its effect on the middle class, the plan could limit taxes on employer benefits to wealthier taxpayers, or it could adjust the subsidies for the uninsured to reflect the higher cost of health care in certain areas. But that would complicate the tax code, cut into the needed revenues and arguably undermine the effort to reduce health-care costs.
Meanwhile, not everyone in a state such as Texas will gain from health-care reform. Larger employers will face a mandate to cover workers or pay a fee. Residents will probably face a mandate to buy coverage and not all will qualify for subsidies to do so. New federal standards for health benefits will mean that self-insured residents of states with loose standards will get easier access to coverage and better benefits, but they'll have to pay more.
Still, the regional tilt is clear. One of the likeliest options for reform is to increase coverage among the working poor by expanding Medicaid eligibility in Southern and Western states that now limit it, even though, with their lower per-capita income, they receive a higher federal match to cover the cost. Texas, for instance, has not updated the Medicaid eligibility rules for parents of poor children in 23 years -- most working parents qualify only if they earn less than $308 per month.
But to persuade stingier states to expand eligibility, the federal government may cover the full Medicaid cost of their newly eligible residents for at least a few years. This will draw howls from states that long ago expanded their eligibility rules and have been paying a large share of the cost of having done so. Again, the plan could try to mollify these states with extra aid, but that adds to the price tag.
"Do you penalize those that have been good in the past by only putting the new federal dollars into where the problem exists, or do you try to equalize the playing field to help the states that have been the best?" asked Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
To conservative health-care experts, a westward and southward wealth transfer is welcome and long overdue. Exempting health benefits from taxes, they say, has meant a big tax break for employers and workers in the wealthier and more unionized regions. And for union members to complain about being taxed for their good benefits just shows that they, too, have been hurt by the system, because health care absorbs too much of their compensation.
"No one should assert that what we have now produces some grand equitable solution," said Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute. "We're going to be moving from imperfect to imperfect."
Then there are staunch advocates for universal health care, like Anne Dunkelberg of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, who reject outright the regional point-scoring mindset, arguing that health-care reform is a national need. "We should be motivated by the fact that [the current system] is unsustainable for the whole country," she maintained.
Of course, that's easy for her to say: She's in Austin, Texas.
macgillisa@washpost.com
Alec MacGillis is a reporter on the Post's national staff. He will be online to discuss this article on Monday at 11 a.m. ET. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
By Alec MacGillis
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901548.html
Those in the red states still smarting over Barack Obama's election victory can perhaps take solace in this: The Democrats' No. 1 domestic policy initiative, universal health care, is likely to help red America at the expense of blue.
Health-care reform may be overdue in a country with 45 million uninsured and soaring medical costs, but it will also represent a substantial wealth transfer from the North and the East to the South and the West. The Northeast and the Midwest have much higher rates of coverage than the rest of the country, led by Massachusetts, where all but 3 percent of residents are insured. The disproportionate share of uninsured is in the South and the West, the result of employment patterns, weak unions and stingy state governments. Texas leads the way, with a quarter of its population uninsured; it would be at the top even without its many illegal immigrants.
Then there is the matter of paying for universal health care. The plan picking up steam on Capitol Hill is to cover much of the $1.2 trillion cost over 10 years by taxing employer-provided health benefits. And who has the highest benefits? People in the North and the East, thanks to pricier health care markets, higher state standards for health coverage and stronger labor unions. Depending on how such a tax were designed, it could land hard not only on corporate executives but also on union workers whose compensation gains show up as health benefits instead of wages.
It would not be the first time that the historically more affluent part of the country has subsidized the less prosperous one. Long before jobs flowed to Mexico and China, they flowed from Massachusetts and Michigan to North Carolina and Tennessee, where unions were weaker and employers could pay less and provide fewer benefits.
The people followed, moving to a Sun Belt where taxes were lower because states offered less in the way of safety nets -- nets that the North and the East will now pay to stitch up via universal health care.
"The cost of health care benefits was very much a factor in plant relocations in the eighties," said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "And now we end up paying for [Sun Belt health care] anyway? It's incredible."
So far, though, the health-care debate is not talked about much in regional terms. In the fight over regulating carbon emissions, regional self-interest is plain, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers from coal-dependent Midwestern and Southern states trying to blunt the legislation. But pushing universal health care are Northeasterners such as Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer, and pushing against it are Sun Belters such as John Cornyn and Jon Kyl.
It is a rare triumph of principle over parochialism -- or maybe no one is looking at the numbers.
Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans lack health insurance. But in the North, many states in addition to Massachusetts have less than 11 percent uninsured. They include Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the South and the West, where small businesses dominate, many states other than Texas have more than 17 percent, including Arizona, Florida, California, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nevada and New Mexico.
The disparities extend to the value of employer-provided benefits. It is highest in the Northeast and the Midwest, lowest in the South and the West.
That means a big regional slant if the plan raises money by ending the tax exemption for employer health benefits or by taxing the value of above-average benefits, which is what Congress is leaning toward. Critics have long argued that exempting employer-provided benefits from taxes is unfair to self-insured people who have to use after-tax dollars to buy coverage, and that the exemption drives health costs higher by encouraging generous benefits plans.
But opponents of taxing health benefits say that it would hit many middle-class families whose packages are worth more than average simply because they live in high-cost markets. They argue that much of the Northeast has high health-care costs partly because the cost of living there is high, not because medical spending is out of control. Indeed, when it comes to Medicare spending, some of the top spending areas are in the South and the West, such as Miami and McAllen, Tex., while some of the most efficient areas are in the North. Better, some say, to raise revenue through other routes -- reducing tax deductions for the wealthy, taxing sugary sodas, raising the capital gains tax or expanding the Medicare tax to unearned income.
"There's a big regional backdrop to this," said Harvard health policy professor Robert Blendon. "Those who are the beneficiaries of all this money that's going to be floating around is one group of states, and who's going to have to pay for the taxes if they lift this exemption is another group."
For example, he said, if you're a New York policeman married to a nurse and your combined salaries are $80,000, your health insurance will be taxed to pay for a family in Mississippi. "I'm trying to figure out how Chuck Schumer can raise his hands and say this is a good thing if New York workers are going to be such losers based on taxes," he said.
Now, if national reform really does restrain health-care costs over the long run, it would help employers and consumers in the Northeast and the Midwest just as it would those elsewhere. And to lessen its effect on the middle class, the plan could limit taxes on employer benefits to wealthier taxpayers, or it could adjust the subsidies for the uninsured to reflect the higher cost of health care in certain areas. But that would complicate the tax code, cut into the needed revenues and arguably undermine the effort to reduce health-care costs.
Meanwhile, not everyone in a state such as Texas will gain from health-care reform. Larger employers will face a mandate to cover workers or pay a fee. Residents will probably face a mandate to buy coverage and not all will qualify for subsidies to do so. New federal standards for health benefits will mean that self-insured residents of states with loose standards will get easier access to coverage and better benefits, but they'll have to pay more.
Still, the regional tilt is clear. One of the likeliest options for reform is to increase coverage among the working poor by expanding Medicaid eligibility in Southern and Western states that now limit it, even though, with their lower per-capita income, they receive a higher federal match to cover the cost. Texas, for instance, has not updated the Medicaid eligibility rules for parents of poor children in 23 years -- most working parents qualify only if they earn less than $308 per month.
But to persuade stingier states to expand eligibility, the federal government may cover the full Medicaid cost of their newly eligible residents for at least a few years. This will draw howls from states that long ago expanded their eligibility rules and have been paying a large share of the cost of having done so. Again, the plan could try to mollify these states with extra aid, but that adds to the price tag.
"Do you penalize those that have been good in the past by only putting the new federal dollars into where the problem exists, or do you try to equalize the playing field to help the states that have been the best?" asked Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
To conservative health-care experts, a westward and southward wealth transfer is welcome and long overdue. Exempting health benefits from taxes, they say, has meant a big tax break for employers and workers in the wealthier and more unionized regions. And for union members to complain about being taxed for their good benefits just shows that they, too, have been hurt by the system, because health care absorbs too much of their compensation.
"No one should assert that what we have now produces some grand equitable solution," said Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute. "We're going to be moving from imperfect to imperfect."
Then there are staunch advocates for universal health care, like Anne Dunkelberg of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, who reject outright the regional point-scoring mindset, arguing that health-care reform is a national need. "We should be motivated by the fact that [the current system] is unsustainable for the whole country," she maintained.
Of course, that's easy for her to say: She's in Austin, Texas.
macgillisa@washpost.com
Alec MacGillis is a reporter on the Post's national staff. He will be online to discuss this article on Monday at 11 a.m. ET. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse
The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse
By Richard A. Clarke
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
rclarke@hks.harvard.edu
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."
By Richard A. Clarke
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
rclarke@hks.harvard.edu
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."
In Turnaround, Cuba Agrees to Talks With U.S.
In Turnaround, Cuba Agrees to Talks With U.S.
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009; 12:44 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053101078.html?hpid=topnews
Cuba has agreed to open talks with the United States on issues ranging from immigration to anti-narcotics cooperation and direct mail service , a senior State Department official said today, in a sign that the island's communist government is warming to President Obama's call for a new relationship after decades of tension.
The breakthrough came shortly before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton left on a trip to Latin America, where she is expected to face pressure to make further gestures to Cuba, including allowing it into the Organization of American States.
A senior State Department official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity, called the Cuban moves "a very positive development" and added: "It's our hope this will be understood in the region in a positive way."
In an initial bid to launch a new relationship with Cuba, President Obama last month scrapped restrictions on Cuban Americans traveling to the island and sending money there. But he has said the United States will not lift its economic embargo until the government of Raul Castro improves its human-rights record and makes democratic reforms.
Cuba had given mixed signals about how willing it was to respond to the Obama administration's overtures. But on Saturday, the State Department official said, the head of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, formally accepted a U.S. offer, made this month, to re-open talks on immigration that the Bush administration had halted in 2003. Those were the highest-level talks between the two sides.
Bolaños also expressed interest in an earlier U.S. proposal to work toward resuming direct U.S. mail service to the island, the official said. It has been years since such service existed.
In addition, the Cubans indicated they would like to explore the possibilities of additional dialogue on counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and disaster response, the official said. The U.S. and Cuban governments currently work together in an informal basis to stop drug runners.
No date was set yet for the talks, the official said.
Clinton is making her third trip to Latin America in four months, an indication of the Obama administration's attention to an area where U.S. influence has waned in recent years.
Clinton's visit, which includes high-level regional meetings and attendance at the inauguration of a new president in El Salvador, comes amid a dramatic shift. Once dominated by the United States, Latin America has diversified its trade, and the presidents of a few countries have taken a strong anti-Washington stance. Even pro-U.S. politicians in the region complain that they were ignored during much of the Bush administration as the United States concentrated on Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton recently expressed concern about the growing role in the area played by China, Russia and Iran, and she is focusing intently on the region.
"We've had a big leadership push into Latin America. . . . there's been a real focus on engaging, there's been a real focus on filling space," a senior State Department official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity before the trip.
President Obama sought to repair relations with Latin America at a summit in Trinidad and Tobago last month in which he pledged to seek "an equal partnership" and not dictate to the region. But that display of goodwill is being put to the test over Cuba. Most Latin American countries would like to lift a 47-year-old ban on Cuba's membership in the Organization of American States at the group's annual assembly in Honduras on Tuesday, but Clinton has resisted.
The disagreement threatens to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies in the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere. Clinton has said the OAS would violate its charter on democratic rights if it accepted the return of the communist-ruled nation unconditionally.
"They have to be willing to take the concrete steps necessary to meet those principles. We've been very clear about that -- move toward democracy, release political prisoners, respect fundamental freedoms," Clinton told Congress recently.
Obama has reversed some Bush administration decisions on Cuba, lifting restrictions on visits by Cuban Americans and offering to re-open immigration talks after a five-year hiatus. But he is moving cautiously, wary of domestic pressure.
The move to re-admit Cuba to the OAS is strongly opposed by Cuban American groups and by some key U.S. senators. One of them, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), has threatened to cut off the U.S. contribution to the OAS, about 60 percent of its budget. Last week, three former Bush administration officials who occupied senior posts dealing with Latin America -- ambassadors Lino Gutierrez, Roger F. Noriega and Otto J. Reich -- appealed to Clinton not to give in.
"Now more than ever, any actions that confer legitimacy on the unelected regime in Havana would be a betrayal of our Cuban brothers and sisters," they wrote.
Clinton's trip starts today in El Salvador with a meeting of Pathways to Prosperity, a Bush administration initiative to encourage greater commerce with its 11 free-trade partners in the region. The group was formed last fall, after Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez started assembling a bloc opposed to free-trade pacts with the United States. It includes Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Dominica.
On Monday, Clinton attends the inauguration of El Salvador's president, the first from the party formed by guerrillas who battled a U.S.-backed government in the the 1980s. The new leader, Mauricio Funes, is the latest sign of the "pink tide" that has washed over Latin America. He has said he will emulate moderate leftists like those governing Brazil and Chile, rather than populists like Chavez.
Clinton's trip wraps up with the OAS meeting.
Many members of the group say the ban on Cuba is outdated because it denounces the island's alignment with a "communist bloc" that disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several countries, however, have indicated they are willing to require Cuba to fulfill some democratic requirements before it fully returns to the OAS.
In the end, lifting the ban would mainly be symbolic, because Cuba has said it has no plans to rejoin a group that it sees as U.S.-dominated. But the debate indicates the emotional punch Cuba still packs across Latin America.
Clinton's trip follows a March visit to Mexico and a swing last month through Haiti and the Dominican Republic on her way to the Summit of the Americas. Several top Obama administration military and political officials also have traveled to the region recently.
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Copyright by The Washington Post
Sunday, May 31, 2009; 12:44 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053101078.html?hpid=topnews
Cuba has agreed to open talks with the United States on issues ranging from immigration to anti-narcotics cooperation and direct mail service , a senior State Department official said today, in a sign that the island's communist government is warming to President Obama's call for a new relationship after decades of tension.
The breakthrough came shortly before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton left on a trip to Latin America, where she is expected to face pressure to make further gestures to Cuba, including allowing it into the Organization of American States.
A senior State Department official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity, called the Cuban moves "a very positive development" and added: "It's our hope this will be understood in the region in a positive way."
In an initial bid to launch a new relationship with Cuba, President Obama last month scrapped restrictions on Cuban Americans traveling to the island and sending money there. But he has said the United States will not lift its economic embargo until the government of Raul Castro improves its human-rights record and makes democratic reforms.
Cuba had given mixed signals about how willing it was to respond to the Obama administration's overtures. But on Saturday, the State Department official said, the head of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, formally accepted a U.S. offer, made this month, to re-open talks on immigration that the Bush administration had halted in 2003. Those were the highest-level talks between the two sides.
Bolaños also expressed interest in an earlier U.S. proposal to work toward resuming direct U.S. mail service to the island, the official said. It has been years since such service existed.
In addition, the Cubans indicated they would like to explore the possibilities of additional dialogue on counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and disaster response, the official said. The U.S. and Cuban governments currently work together in an informal basis to stop drug runners.
No date was set yet for the talks, the official said.
Clinton is making her third trip to Latin America in four months, an indication of the Obama administration's attention to an area where U.S. influence has waned in recent years.
Clinton's visit, which includes high-level regional meetings and attendance at the inauguration of a new president in El Salvador, comes amid a dramatic shift. Once dominated by the United States, Latin America has diversified its trade, and the presidents of a few countries have taken a strong anti-Washington stance. Even pro-U.S. politicians in the region complain that they were ignored during much of the Bush administration as the United States concentrated on Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton recently expressed concern about the growing role in the area played by China, Russia and Iran, and she is focusing intently on the region.
"We've had a big leadership push into Latin America. . . . there's been a real focus on engaging, there's been a real focus on filling space," a senior State Department official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity before the trip.
President Obama sought to repair relations with Latin America at a summit in Trinidad and Tobago last month in which he pledged to seek "an equal partnership" and not dictate to the region. But that display of goodwill is being put to the test over Cuba. Most Latin American countries would like to lift a 47-year-old ban on Cuba's membership in the Organization of American States at the group's annual assembly in Honduras on Tuesday, but Clinton has resisted.
The disagreement threatens to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies in the OAS, the main forum for political cooperation in the hemisphere. Clinton has said the OAS would violate its charter on democratic rights if it accepted the return of the communist-ruled nation unconditionally.
"They have to be willing to take the concrete steps necessary to meet those principles. We've been very clear about that -- move toward democracy, release political prisoners, respect fundamental freedoms," Clinton told Congress recently.
Obama has reversed some Bush administration decisions on Cuba, lifting restrictions on visits by Cuban Americans and offering to re-open immigration talks after a five-year hiatus. But he is moving cautiously, wary of domestic pressure.
The move to re-admit Cuba to the OAS is strongly opposed by Cuban American groups and by some key U.S. senators. One of them, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), has threatened to cut off the U.S. contribution to the OAS, about 60 percent of its budget. Last week, three former Bush administration officials who occupied senior posts dealing with Latin America -- ambassadors Lino Gutierrez, Roger F. Noriega and Otto J. Reich -- appealed to Clinton not to give in.
"Now more than ever, any actions that confer legitimacy on the unelected regime in Havana would be a betrayal of our Cuban brothers and sisters," they wrote.
Clinton's trip starts today in El Salvador with a meeting of Pathways to Prosperity, a Bush administration initiative to encourage greater commerce with its 11 free-trade partners in the region. The group was formed last fall, after Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez started assembling a bloc opposed to free-trade pacts with the United States. It includes Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Dominica.
On Monday, Clinton attends the inauguration of El Salvador's president, the first from the party formed by guerrillas who battled a U.S.-backed government in the the 1980s. The new leader, Mauricio Funes, is the latest sign of the "pink tide" that has washed over Latin America. He has said he will emulate moderate leftists like those governing Brazil and Chile, rather than populists like Chavez.
Clinton's trip wraps up with the OAS meeting.
Many members of the group say the ban on Cuba is outdated because it denounces the island's alignment with a "communist bloc" that disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several countries, however, have indicated they are willing to require Cuba to fulfill some democratic requirements before it fully returns to the OAS.
In the end, lifting the ban would mainly be symbolic, because Cuba has said it has no plans to rejoin a group that it sees as U.S.-dominated. But the debate indicates the emotional punch Cuba still packs across Latin America.
Clinton's trip follows a March visit to Mexico and a swing last month through Haiti and the Dominican Republic on her way to the Summit of the Americas. Several top Obama administration military and political officials also have traveled to the region recently.
Geithner Calls for More Economic Ties With China
Geithner Calls for More Economic Ties With China
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/31/world/AP-AS-Geithner-China.html?ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- After years of acrimonious economic relations with China, the U.S. insists it wants to turn the page and develop closer ties with the world's third largest economy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who arrived Sunday in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese leaders, said he wanted to foster the same kind of working relationship with China that the United States has enjoyed for decades with European economic powers.
On his first visit to China as treasury secretary, Geithner said the Obama administration was committed to forging a new relationship with China after trade disputes with the U.S. over the past decade.
Those fights have reflected record U.S. trade deficits with China. U.S. critics of China's economic policies say they have contributed to the loss of millions of American manufacturing jobs.
But China is America's biggest creditor, holding $768 billion in Treasury securities. The U.S. also hopes China will play a positive role in resolving a tense dispute with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
Ahead of his meetings, Geithner played down long-standing areas of disagreement such as China's undervalued currency.
''We would like to build with China the kind of relationship we built with the G-7 over the last several decades,'' Geithner told reporters traveling with him to Beijing. The Group of Seven includes the traditional economic powers -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
Geithner said that the U.S. economy, mired in its longest recession since World War II, was beginning to stabilize. ''We are seeing more durable stability in the economy and the financial system is in substantially better shape,'' Geithner said.
But he said much more needed to be done in the U.S. and in other major economies to make a sustainable recovery possible.
Geithner could not escape the fallout from the recession even as he crossed the globe. He took a military aircraft with the latest in communications equipment that allowed him to be in frequent contact with Steven Rattner, head of the administration's auto task force, and Obama economic aide Lawrence Summers, who phoned with updates on the pivotal weekend negotiations with General Motors Corp.
Geithner spent the trip in a private cabin at the back of the plane that was equipped with a desk and a bed. Most of the time he was either working the phones, huddled with aides or revising the speech he was to give Monday.
China, with 1.3 billion people, ranks as the third largest economy after the U.S. and Japan. Geithner said China's new status should be recognized with a bigger voice in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of 20 major industrial countries and emerging economic powers, which includes China, Brazil and India, pledged in April to work cooperatively on overhauling the IMF and other global institutions. The goal is to give them greater resources to deal with the current crisis and provide China and other emerging countries with more say in how the institutions are run.
''We are committed to reforming the international system and our interests are best served by giving China a stake in that process,'' Geithner told reporters.
Geithner planned a speech Monday at Peking University assessing the global economy and U.S.-China relations. He spent two summers at the university as a college student learning Mandarin Chinese.
At a briefing previewing the trip for Asian journalists, Geithner referenced those ties, saying he had taught Chinese while in college and had a ''long personal interest'' in the country. But he insisted that while he had worked very hard at his Chinese language studies, he was not proficient.
''I cannot actually speak Chinese with competence,'' he said. ''I did study though for a long time, very hard. I practiced my characters very carefully.''
In addition to meeting with some of his former professors on Monday, Geithner was scheduled to visit an economist training program set up by his father when the elder Geithner was in charge of Ford Foundation programs in Asia.
The Obama administration and China have come out with two massive economic stimulus plans while European countries have resisted Obama's calls to do more. They say they do not want to face the same deficit problems that the U.S. has.
China has turned its huge trade surpluses with the U.S. into the largest holdings of Treasury debt, but has raised concerns about America's commitment to deficit reform. Financial markets in recent weeks have sent long-term interest rates higher, a move that some attribute to worries about the U.S. budget deficits.
The administration projects that the deficit for this year will hit $1.84 trillion, a record and four-times higher than the previous mark set last year.
Geithner said that the administration had a credible program to reduce the deficits once the economy begins to recover. ''No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,'' he told reporters.
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/31/world/AP-AS-Geithner-China.html?ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- After years of acrimonious economic relations with China, the U.S. insists it wants to turn the page and develop closer ties with the world's third largest economy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who arrived Sunday in Beijing for two days of talks with Chinese leaders, said he wanted to foster the same kind of working relationship with China that the United States has enjoyed for decades with European economic powers.
On his first visit to China as treasury secretary, Geithner said the Obama administration was committed to forging a new relationship with China after trade disputes with the U.S. over the past decade.
Those fights have reflected record U.S. trade deficits with China. U.S. critics of China's economic policies say they have contributed to the loss of millions of American manufacturing jobs.
But China is America's biggest creditor, holding $768 billion in Treasury securities. The U.S. also hopes China will play a positive role in resolving a tense dispute with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
Ahead of his meetings, Geithner played down long-standing areas of disagreement such as China's undervalued currency.
''We would like to build with China the kind of relationship we built with the G-7 over the last several decades,'' Geithner told reporters traveling with him to Beijing. The Group of Seven includes the traditional economic powers -- the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
Geithner said that the U.S. economy, mired in its longest recession since World War II, was beginning to stabilize. ''We are seeing more durable stability in the economy and the financial system is in substantially better shape,'' Geithner said.
But he said much more needed to be done in the U.S. and in other major economies to make a sustainable recovery possible.
Geithner could not escape the fallout from the recession even as he crossed the globe. He took a military aircraft with the latest in communications equipment that allowed him to be in frequent contact with Steven Rattner, head of the administration's auto task force, and Obama economic aide Lawrence Summers, who phoned with updates on the pivotal weekend negotiations with General Motors Corp.
Geithner spent the trip in a private cabin at the back of the plane that was equipped with a desk and a bed. Most of the time he was either working the phones, huddled with aides or revising the speech he was to give Monday.
China, with 1.3 billion people, ranks as the third largest economy after the U.S. and Japan. Geithner said China's new status should be recognized with a bigger voice in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of 20 major industrial countries and emerging economic powers, which includes China, Brazil and India, pledged in April to work cooperatively on overhauling the IMF and other global institutions. The goal is to give them greater resources to deal with the current crisis and provide China and other emerging countries with more say in how the institutions are run.
''We are committed to reforming the international system and our interests are best served by giving China a stake in that process,'' Geithner told reporters.
Geithner planned a speech Monday at Peking University assessing the global economy and U.S.-China relations. He spent two summers at the university as a college student learning Mandarin Chinese.
At a briefing previewing the trip for Asian journalists, Geithner referenced those ties, saying he had taught Chinese while in college and had a ''long personal interest'' in the country. But he insisted that while he had worked very hard at his Chinese language studies, he was not proficient.
''I cannot actually speak Chinese with competence,'' he said. ''I did study though for a long time, very hard. I practiced my characters very carefully.''
In addition to meeting with some of his former professors on Monday, Geithner was scheduled to visit an economist training program set up by his father when the elder Geithner was in charge of Ford Foundation programs in Asia.
The Obama administration and China have come out with two massive economic stimulus plans while European countries have resisted Obama's calls to do more. They say they do not want to face the same deficit problems that the U.S. has.
China has turned its huge trade surpluses with the U.S. into the largest holdings of Treasury debt, but has raised concerns about America's commitment to deficit reform. Financial markets in recent weeks have sent long-term interest rates higher, a move that some attribute to worries about the U.S. budget deficits.
The administration projects that the deficit for this year will hit $1.84 trillion, a record and four-times higher than the previous mark set last year.
Geithner said that the administration had a credible program to reduce the deficits once the economy begins to recover. ''No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,'' he told reporters.
Moses and Jesus Golf
Moses and Jesus Golf
Moses and Jesus have teed up at a very long hole, and Jesus is sizing up his golf bag. Unexpectedly, he pulls out a seven iron.
"Jesus, it's a long hole," says Moses, "You'll never make it with a seven iron. Better use a driver."
Jesus smiles and replies, "Arnold Palmer does it." Then he hits the ball with a resounding thwack, and it lands right in the middle of a big water hazard. Moses generously offers to shag the ball and give his friend another crack at it. So Moses saunters over to the water hazard and with great aplomb, parts the waters and picks out the ball. Jesus tees up again, and again he takes the seven iron.
Moses laments, "Jesus, you already tried that iron. Believe me, the hole is too long. Here's a driver."
Jesus patiently shakes his head and steps up to the ball. "Arnold Palmer does it," he says. Then he hits the ball smartly, and it
sails high and short, landing once again in the same hazard. This time Jesus goes off to shag the ball himself. He approaches the hazard, walks across the water, and picks out the ball.
Meanwhile, the next foursome of players has caught up from behind and is looking on, astonished.
"Who does he think he is," says one man, "Jesus Christ?"
"No," says Moses sadly. "Unfortunately, he thinks he's Arnold Palmer."
Moses and Jesus have teed up at a very long hole, and Jesus is sizing up his golf bag. Unexpectedly, he pulls out a seven iron.
"Jesus, it's a long hole," says Moses, "You'll never make it with a seven iron. Better use a driver."
Jesus smiles and replies, "Arnold Palmer does it." Then he hits the ball with a resounding thwack, and it lands right in the middle of a big water hazard. Moses generously offers to shag the ball and give his friend another crack at it. So Moses saunters over to the water hazard and with great aplomb, parts the waters and picks out the ball. Jesus tees up again, and again he takes the seven iron.
Moses laments, "Jesus, you already tried that iron. Believe me, the hole is too long. Here's a driver."
Jesus patiently shakes his head and steps up to the ball. "Arnold Palmer does it," he says. Then he hits the ball smartly, and it
sails high and short, landing once again in the same hazard. This time Jesus goes off to shag the ball himself. He approaches the hazard, walks across the water, and picks out the ball.
Meanwhile, the next foursome of players has caught up from behind and is looking on, astonished.
"Who does he think he is," says one man, "Jesus Christ?"
"No," says Moses sadly. "Unfortunately, he thinks he's Arnold Palmer."
Six Are Killed in West Bank as Fatah Moves Against Hamas
Six Are Killed in West Bank as Fatah Moves Against Hamas
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority forces clashed with Hamas militants in the West Bank early Sunday, leaving six dead, in the bloodiest such encounter in two years.
The violence came days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas assured President Obama in Washington that his troops were imposing order on the area. In Gaza, Hamas reacted by arresting Fatah activists and hinting of further revenge.
The clashes and threats show that Fatah, which dominates in the West Bank, and Hamas, which runs Gaza, remain in a tense standoff, and that the Palestinian unity needed for creation of a state is far off. Both sides said unity talks mediated by Egypt were imperiled.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbas’s West Bank forces told a news conference in Ramallah that a patrol in the city of Qalqilya had come under fire Saturday night from a house, leading to a curfew and hours-long negotiations. A grenade was thrown from the house killing three security officers, the house was stormed, two Hamas militiamen, including the city commander, were killed along with the owner of the house, a bystander.
He said weapons and documents were found on the men and added that Palestinian Authority forces had found similar caches in recent months, including inside a mosque. Some 200 Hamas-affiliated men were in jail in the West Bank awaiting trial, he said but insisted they were charged with specific violations, not for Hamas affiliation.
“In the last two years, we have proved our ability to impose law and order,” the spokesman, Adnan Dameiri, told the news conference. “We will continue our campaign to dismantle armed groups.”
Hussein a Sheikh, a West Bank Fatah leader, told Israel Radio: “Whoever wants now to come in and disrupt the security and order of the Palestinian residents, to have a militia here, gangs here and there and an underground below, we won’t agree.”
The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza.
Hamas officials accused the West Bank authorities of being quislings for Israel and the West and betraying the Palestinian national cause. Israeli officials, not wanting to besmirch the Palestinian Authority among its public with a bear hug, pointedly declined comment. But Israeli soldiers control the West Bank, and Palestinian security forces coordinate their actions with them. On Thursday in the south Hebron hills, Israeli officials killed a long-wanted Hamas militant said to have been involved in planning two suicide bombings of Israelis in the 1990s.
After Hamas, an Islamist group that rejects Israel’s existence, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, it and Fatah tried to put together a unity government. But tensions were high and street fights in Gaza common between forces loyal to the two movements. Two years ago the skirmishes broke out into a four-day war, and Hamas took over Gaza entirely leaving Fatah in power only in the West Bank, supported by Israel.
Abu Obaida, spokesman for the Hamas military wing known as the Qassam Brigade, said at a Gaza news conference on Sunday, “We are confronting two enemies, the Israeli occupier and the agency that serves the agenda of Washington and Tel Aviv.” He added, “This spark reminds us of what happened in Gaza two years ago.”
A Fatah leader in Gaza said some of his men had been arrested on Sunday following the Qalqilya clash. Hamas leaders said that unless their men were released in the West Bank, unity talks would not proceed.
In other developments on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet rejected a bill aimed at Israel’s Arab minority that would have required a loyalty oath for citizenship. This means the bill, championed by the Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has little chance of passing legislative scrutiny. It can still be presented as a private bill but without the government’s backing.
A second Yisrael Beiteinu bill that has been highly controversial was watered down by the ministers. It was aimed at barring any marking of Israel’s Independence Day as Nakba Day, meaning the day that Palestinians suffered a catastrophe. Enacting such a ban was widely viewed as a violation of the country’s free speech laws.
The ministers changed the draft of the law so that it bars the expenditure of state money to mark the Nakba. This version will still have to pass three votes in parliament and its chances are considered poor.
Israel started a five-day civil defense exercise on Sunday aimed at the possibility of coping with multiple missile attacks, the largest ever of its kind. The drill will stage mock disasters and test emergency crews in their ability to evacuate buildings. On Tuesday, sirens will sound requiring everyone to go into a secure space.
At the start of the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the drill and of the death on Saturday of Ephraim Katzir, who was president of Israel from 1973 to 1978 and a noted biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute. He was 93.
Khaled Abu-Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, and Taghreed el-Khodary from Gaza.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority forces clashed with Hamas militants in the West Bank early Sunday, leaving six dead, in the bloodiest such encounter in two years.
The violence came days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas assured President Obama in Washington that his troops were imposing order on the area. In Gaza, Hamas reacted by arresting Fatah activists and hinting of further revenge.
The clashes and threats show that Fatah, which dominates in the West Bank, and Hamas, which runs Gaza, remain in a tense standoff, and that the Palestinian unity needed for creation of a state is far off. Both sides said unity talks mediated by Egypt were imperiled.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbas’s West Bank forces told a news conference in Ramallah that a patrol in the city of Qalqilya had come under fire Saturday night from a house, leading to a curfew and hours-long negotiations. A grenade was thrown from the house killing three security officers, the house was stormed, two Hamas militiamen, including the city commander, were killed along with the owner of the house, a bystander.
He said weapons and documents were found on the men and added that Palestinian Authority forces had found similar caches in recent months, including inside a mosque. Some 200 Hamas-affiliated men were in jail in the West Bank awaiting trial, he said but insisted they were charged with specific violations, not for Hamas affiliation.
“In the last two years, we have proved our ability to impose law and order,” the spokesman, Adnan Dameiri, told the news conference. “We will continue our campaign to dismantle armed groups.”
Hussein a Sheikh, a West Bank Fatah leader, told Israel Radio: “Whoever wants now to come in and disrupt the security and order of the Palestinian residents, to have a militia here, gangs here and there and an underground below, we won’t agree.”
The United States and European Union train and support Mr. Abbas’s troops in the hope of creating a strong enough force to prevent Hamas from challenging its West Bank rule and ultimately perhaps helping Mr. Abbas back into Gaza.
Hamas officials accused the West Bank authorities of being quislings for Israel and the West and betraying the Palestinian national cause. Israeli officials, not wanting to besmirch the Palestinian Authority among its public with a bear hug, pointedly declined comment. But Israeli soldiers control the West Bank, and Palestinian security forces coordinate their actions with them. On Thursday in the south Hebron hills, Israeli officials killed a long-wanted Hamas militant said to have been involved in planning two suicide bombings of Israelis in the 1990s.
After Hamas, an Islamist group that rejects Israel’s existence, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, it and Fatah tried to put together a unity government. But tensions were high and street fights in Gaza common between forces loyal to the two movements. Two years ago the skirmishes broke out into a four-day war, and Hamas took over Gaza entirely leaving Fatah in power only in the West Bank, supported by Israel.
Abu Obaida, spokesman for the Hamas military wing known as the Qassam Brigade, said at a Gaza news conference on Sunday, “We are confronting two enemies, the Israeli occupier and the agency that serves the agenda of Washington and Tel Aviv.” He added, “This spark reminds us of what happened in Gaza two years ago.”
A Fatah leader in Gaza said some of his men had been arrested on Sunday following the Qalqilya clash. Hamas leaders said that unless their men were released in the West Bank, unity talks would not proceed.
In other developments on Sunday, the Israeli cabinet rejected a bill aimed at Israel’s Arab minority that would have required a loyalty oath for citizenship. This means the bill, championed by the Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has little chance of passing legislative scrutiny. It can still be presented as a private bill but without the government’s backing.
A second Yisrael Beiteinu bill that has been highly controversial was watered down by the ministers. It was aimed at barring any marking of Israel’s Independence Day as Nakba Day, meaning the day that Palestinians suffered a catastrophe. Enacting such a ban was widely viewed as a violation of the country’s free speech laws.
The ministers changed the draft of the law so that it bars the expenditure of state money to mark the Nakba. This version will still have to pass three votes in parliament and its chances are considered poor.
Israel started a five-day civil defense exercise on Sunday aimed at the possibility of coping with multiple missile attacks, the largest ever of its kind. The drill will stage mock disasters and test emergency crews in their ability to evacuate buildings. On Tuesday, sirens will sound requiring everyone to go into a secure space.
At the start of the Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the drill and of the death on Saturday of Ephraim Katzir, who was president of Israel from 1973 to 1978 and a noted biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute. He was 93.
Khaled Abu-Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, and Taghreed el-Khodary from Gaza.
Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?
Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter the president’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31rich.html?th&emc=th
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
By FRANK RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opinion/31rich.html?th&emc=th
AFTER watching the farce surrounding Dick Cheney’s coming-out party this month, you have to wonder: Which will reach Washington first, change or the terrorists? If change doesn’t arrive soon, terrorists may well rush in where the capital’s fools now tread.
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
You can find a link to the complete Landay-Strobel accounting of Cheney’s errors in the online version of this column. The failure of much of the press to match their effort has a troubling historical antecedent. These are the same two journalists who, reporting for what was then Knight Ridder, uncovered much of the deceit in the Bush-Cheney case for the Iraq war in the crucial weeks before Congress gave the invasion the green light.
On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.
Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.
When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.
“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”
The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.
And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
Shooting to Software Stardom on the iPhone
Shooting to Software Stardom on the iPhone
By RANDALL STROSS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/31digi.html?th&emc=th
MITCHELL WAITE could think of only one reason that Apple’s legal department would leave a voice message last February asking him to call back: he was about to be sued. Mr. Waite has a tiny software company bearing his name — it has no full-time employees — whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.
IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from $4.99 to $29.99.
“I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Mr. Waite said.
It’s a delightful story, not only because it does not involve a lawsuit, but also because it does not involve promotion fees. Apple does not accept money from companies whose products are placed in its commercials or in the other prime real estate, the “Featured” section of the App Store.
This has earned Apple applause from software developers and backers. “Apple doesn’t want the money. It’s a level playing field,” said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If Apple likes the app, he added, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person or a 10,000-person company; they’ll put it in ‘New’ or ‘What’s Hot.’ ”
A developer easily gains entrance to that level playing field, by paying a nominal $99-a-year fee for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store. It’s often a slow process and has drawn the ire of many developers. But the worst that Apple has been accused of is maddening opacity, not discrimination.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of App Store sales, a paltry slice compared with that exacted by other online stores in the past. Those that distributed software for the Palm Pilot, for example, took 50 to 70 percent of sales as their cut, according to Jeff Scott, founder of 148Apps.com, a Web site offering in-depth reviews of iPhone apps.
Apple also makes buying and downloading a snap; the app is dispatched wirelessly from the store to the iPhone and is ready to run in a few seconds.
The App Store’s very appeal, bringing in so many developers, has intensified a perennially vexing problem: How can a new software title come to the attention of prospective customers?
“For 99 bucks a year, Apple gives you the ability to sell software to millions,” Mr. Scott said. “They solved the distribution problem, but they did not solve the marketing problem for developers.”
Mr. Scott’s site, 148Apps.com, offers a partial solution, but it reviews only hundreds of apps, not tens of thousands.
Apple can feature only a few apps, of course; “featuring” all would mean featuring none. The unfeatured are stuck in crowded quarters, placed into one of 20 categories. Only five apps can be displayed on the phone’s small screen at a time; unless an app clambers up the equivalent of a best-seller list to appear among the five visible on the first screen, the casual browser will probably not see it. As the number of apps grows, it becomes ever harder to break into even the top 100 in a category.
Neil Young, C.E.O. of Ngmoco, a publisher of iPhone games, said his company watched closely what happened to the 5,000 titles added after the App Store passed the 25,000-title milestone.
“Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,” Mr. Young said. “It’s very difficult for an app to rise above the noise.”
He credited recommendations among gaming enthusiasts, from one friend to the next, as important to the success of his company’s titles.
In April, Apple celebrated the one billionth download from the App Store in only nine months. For all of its success with the store, however, Apple remains most interested in using third-party software to sell its hardware. Mr. Waite said an Apple liaison told him, “We pick apps not for how well they’re selling — we pick apps that will sell more iPhones and iPod Touches because they show off the best features or are something you can’t get elsewhere.”
Fitting that bill is Mr. Waite’s iBird application, which turns the iPhone into an always-in-hand field guide replete with bird calls that a printed field guide cannot provide.
Tens of thousands of iPhone App developers will never get that life-changing call from Apple and will never get within sight of a top-five list.
“In many ways, developing a program is like writing a book,” said Jeffrey Tarter, the founding editor of a developers’ newsletter, Softletter. “You say, ‘I’m going to make something first of all that I like. Then I’ll worry about how to make money.’ ”
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
By RANDALL STROSS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/business/31digi.html?th&emc=th
MITCHELL WAITE could think of only one reason that Apple’s legal department would leave a voice message last February asking him to call back: he was about to be sued. Mr. Waite has a tiny software company bearing his name — it has no full-time employees — whose principal product is a field guide to birds called iBird Explorer, which runs on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
He called back and discovered that his life was about to change no less than if the lottery authority had told him he’d won the big prize: Apple had decided to feature iBird in a television commercial.
IBird was one of three applications that appeared in the spot, and while it got only about seven seconds, that was all it needed to become the No. 1 “reference” app in the iPhone App Store, a software star among the 35,000-plus applications now crowding the store’s shelf. The iBird Explorer is offered in different versions, priced from $4.99 to $29.99.
“I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,” Mr. Waite said.
It’s a delightful story, not only because it does not involve a lawsuit, but also because it does not involve promotion fees. Apple does not accept money from companies whose products are placed in its commercials or in the other prime real estate, the “Featured” section of the App Store.
This has earned Apple applause from software developers and backers. “Apple doesn’t want the money. It’s a level playing field,” said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. If Apple likes the app, he added, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person or a 10,000-person company; they’ll put it in ‘New’ or ‘What’s Hot.’ ”
A developer easily gains entrance to that level playing field, by paying a nominal $99-a-year fee for the iPhone Developer Program. A completed app must secure Apple’s approval before it is put on sale in the App Store. It’s often a slow process and has drawn the ire of many developers. But the worst that Apple has been accused of is maddening opacity, not discrimination.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of App Store sales, a paltry slice compared with that exacted by other online stores in the past. Those that distributed software for the Palm Pilot, for example, took 50 to 70 percent of sales as their cut, according to Jeff Scott, founder of 148Apps.com, a Web site offering in-depth reviews of iPhone apps.
Apple also makes buying and downloading a snap; the app is dispatched wirelessly from the store to the iPhone and is ready to run in a few seconds.
The App Store’s very appeal, bringing in so many developers, has intensified a perennially vexing problem: How can a new software title come to the attention of prospective customers?
“For 99 bucks a year, Apple gives you the ability to sell software to millions,” Mr. Scott said. “They solved the distribution problem, but they did not solve the marketing problem for developers.”
Mr. Scott’s site, 148Apps.com, offers a partial solution, but it reviews only hundreds of apps, not tens of thousands.
Apple can feature only a few apps, of course; “featuring” all would mean featuring none. The unfeatured are stuck in crowded quarters, placed into one of 20 categories. Only five apps can be displayed on the phone’s small screen at a time; unless an app clambers up the equivalent of a best-seller list to appear among the five visible on the first screen, the casual browser will probably not see it. As the number of apps grows, it becomes ever harder to break into even the top 100 in a category.
Neil Young, C.E.O. of Ngmoco, a publisher of iPhone games, said his company watched closely what happened to the 5,000 titles added after the App Store passed the 25,000-title milestone.
“Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,” Mr. Young said. “It’s very difficult for an app to rise above the noise.”
He credited recommendations among gaming enthusiasts, from one friend to the next, as important to the success of his company’s titles.
In April, Apple celebrated the one billionth download from the App Store in only nine months. For all of its success with the store, however, Apple remains most interested in using third-party software to sell its hardware. Mr. Waite said an Apple liaison told him, “We pick apps not for how well they’re selling — we pick apps that will sell more iPhones and iPod Touches because they show off the best features or are something you can’t get elsewhere.”
Fitting that bill is Mr. Waite’s iBird application, which turns the iPhone into an always-in-hand field guide replete with bird calls that a printed field guide cannot provide.
Tens of thousands of iPhone App developers will never get that life-changing call from Apple and will never get within sight of a top-five list.
“In many ways, developing a program is like writing a book,” said Jeffrey Tarter, the founding editor of a developers’ newsletter, Softletter. “You say, ‘I’m going to make something first of all that I like. Then I’ll worry about how to make money.’ ”
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.
Deep Cuts Threaten to Reshape California
Deep Cuts Threaten to Reshape California
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31calif.html?th&emc=th
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not get the election results he sought. Now he seems determined to show California voters the consequences.
In a special election on May 19, voters rejected a batch of measures on increasing taxes, borrowing funds and reapportioning state money that were designed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap. The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”
In less than two weeks, the administration has gone from warning residents that a vote against the budget measures would send the state — some $24 billion in the red — into utter turmoil to sanguine acceptance that “the people have spoken” and that the government must move on.
And so it is that administration officials have been sent off to talk to the Legislature and hold conference calls about the latest proposed blows to state programs, while Mr. Schwarzenegger largely tends to other aspects of governing. He was in Livermore on Friday dedicating the world’s largest laser system (for sustaining nuclear fusion), and has updated his Twitter feed. “Backstage at the Tonight Show,” one tweet said.
The measures proposed by the administration to balance the budget, including the $2.8 billion in cuts outlined on Friday, are unlike any proposed to the state’s social services in a generation.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is threatening to eliminate the Healthy Family Program, the state’s health insurance program that covers over 900,000 children and is financed with state and federal money, as well as the state’s main welfare program, known as Cal-Works, which provides temporary financial assistance to poor families and a caregiver for the severely disabled.
The $1 billion in cuts to programs for the poor would be met with $680 million in new cuts to education and a 5 percent salary reduction for state employees, many of whom are already enduring furloughs.
These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.
Some of the proposed cuts are clearly saber rattling on the governor’s part, but there is a nervous acceptance among lawmakers, advocates for the poor and outside budget experts that the state is out of money and time.
If lawmakers sign off on closing the health insurance program for children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, California would be the first state in the nation to close the popular program. Begun in 1997, the program, known as S-CHIP, reimburses states at a higher rate than for Medicaid to deliver health insurance to children and teenagers. With the cuts to Medicaid, the state would probably increase its number of uninsured people by nearly 2 million, the California Budget Project says.
“As the nation is debating how to move forward to provide broader health care coverage,” said Diane Rowland, the executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, “for a state to be scaling back coverage for children would be a major challenge. This program means a lot to working families. It is well run and well liked by people on both sides of the aisle.”
Further, the governor has gone after some spending not covered by mandates enacted by voters through ballot measures, a quirk of California budgeting that has helped create the mess the state is in.
“Certainly the programs that were targeted are not protected by the California Constitution or required by federal law,” said Jean Ross, the executive director of the California Budget Project, a left-leaning policy organization that analyzes the budget.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature has been uncharacteristically silent on most of the cuts, most likely because lawmakers know that tax increases are not politically palatable, that huge cuts in some form are in the offing no matter what, and that any program they wish to spare will quite likely have advocates among their ranks.
“There is no drawing lines in the sand,” said Alicia Trost, the spokeswoman for State Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem. “Everyone knows we’re the majority, and we all know where we stand.”
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31calif.html?th&emc=th
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not get the election results he sought. Now he seems determined to show California voters the consequences.
In a special election on May 19, voters rejected a batch of measures on increasing taxes, borrowing funds and reapportioning state money that were designed to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap. The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference, if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed.
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.” He added: “You have to cut where the money is.”
In less than two weeks, the administration has gone from warning residents that a vote against the budget measures would send the state — some $24 billion in the red — into utter turmoil to sanguine acceptance that “the people have spoken” and that the government must move on.
And so it is that administration officials have been sent off to talk to the Legislature and hold conference calls about the latest proposed blows to state programs, while Mr. Schwarzenegger largely tends to other aspects of governing. He was in Livermore on Friday dedicating the world’s largest laser system (for sustaining nuclear fusion), and has updated his Twitter feed. “Backstage at the Tonight Show,” one tweet said.
The measures proposed by the administration to balance the budget, including the $2.8 billion in cuts outlined on Friday, are unlike any proposed to the state’s social services in a generation.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is threatening to eliminate the Healthy Family Program, the state’s health insurance program that covers over 900,000 children and is financed with state and federal money, as well as the state’s main welfare program, known as Cal-Works, which provides temporary financial assistance to poor families and a caregiver for the severely disabled.
The $1 billion in cuts to programs for the poor would be met with $680 million in new cuts to education and a 5 percent salary reduction for state employees, many of whom are already enduring furloughs.
These proposals, as well as those that would make cuts to state parks, the prison system and other state agencies, are winding their way through Sacramento now, where they will be voted on by committees and eventually the full Legislature.
Some of the proposed cuts are clearly saber rattling on the governor’s part, but there is a nervous acceptance among lawmakers, advocates for the poor and outside budget experts that the state is out of money and time.
If lawmakers sign off on closing the health insurance program for children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, California would be the first state in the nation to close the popular program. Begun in 1997, the program, known as S-CHIP, reimburses states at a higher rate than for Medicaid to deliver health insurance to children and teenagers. With the cuts to Medicaid, the state would probably increase its number of uninsured people by nearly 2 million, the California Budget Project says.
“As the nation is debating how to move forward to provide broader health care coverage,” said Diane Rowland, the executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, “for a state to be scaling back coverage for children would be a major challenge. This program means a lot to working families. It is well run and well liked by people on both sides of the aisle.”
Further, the governor has gone after some spending not covered by mandates enacted by voters through ballot measures, a quirk of California budgeting that has helped create the mess the state is in.
“Certainly the programs that were targeted are not protected by the California Constitution or required by federal law,” said Jean Ross, the executive director of the California Budget Project, a left-leaning policy organization that analyzes the budget.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature has been uncharacteristically silent on most of the cuts, most likely because lawmakers know that tax increases are not politically palatable, that huge cuts in some form are in the offing no matter what, and that any program they wish to spare will quite likely have advocates among their ranks.
“There is no drawing lines in the sand,” said Alicia Trost, the spokeswoman for State Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and president pro tem. “Everyone knows we’re the majority, and we all know where we stand.”
Devotion and Money Tie Iranians to Iraqi City
Devotion and Money Tie Iranians to Iraqi City
By SAM DAGHER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world/middleeast/31karbala.html?th&emc=th
KARBALA, Iraq — Over just two days, about 80 Iranian pilgrims were killed in April in suicide bombings in Iraq. But even though the pilgrims are clearly a favored target for Sunni extremists in Iraq, and though the threat continues, it seems nothing will keep the Iranians from coming here.
Iraq allows up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims to enter each day. The two countries have long had a complicated relationship.
The New York Times
Karbala’s economy depends on money spent by Iranians.
On a recent afternoon, a group of pilgrims from the Iranian city of Isfahan — many in tears and in a trancelike state — inched toward the shimmering golden-domed shrine ahead chanting “Hussein beloved” in Persian. Inside, Iranians jostled other pilgrims to grip the ornate gold and silver cagelike structure bearing the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, shrouded in green fabric embroidered with precious stones.
It is religious devotion that compels them to come. But Iran’s government is part of the equation, too, encouraging a greater Iranian presence in Iraq by supporting companies that control a lucrative segment of the pilgrimage business and renovating and maintaining Shiite shrines in Iraq.
While the United States and surrounding Arab nations worry about direct Iranian influence and support for armed groups, the pilgrimages present a small but important example of Iran’s rising soft power in Iraq. And it is something that makes Iraqis increasingly resentful.
Recently, the Interior Ministry banned Persian signs inside Karbala despite the fact most Iranian pilgrims speak no Arabic.
In April, Karbala’s residents demonstrated against the awarding of a contract to an Iranian company, Al Kawthar, to renovate the historic city center, including the area around the shrines of Imam Hussein and his brother Abu Fadhil al-Abbas, part of a $100-million project. Officials say they have been inundated with petitions against the Iranian proposal.
“We are Arabs, we will not accept to be colonized by anyone,” said Ali al-Hayawi, a hotel owner in Karbala catering to pilgrims, who is opposed to Iran’s involvement in the project. “We do not take orders from the Iranians.”
The dynamic in Karbala suggests that Iran may have a hard time exerting any deep sway among Iraqis, even among fellow Shiites, with suspicion playing out on several fronts. But at the national level, the relationship is more of a tug of war. The Iraqi government may want to keep Iran at arm’s length, but it also needs Iran economically and as a strategic ally.
Iran and Iraq have always had a contentious relationship, and it became more complicated with the American presence in Iraq.
The two predominantly Shiite countries share an 800-mile border and historical, cultural and trade ties, but attitudes on both sides remain colored both by ancient enmities and an eight-year war in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands dead or maimed. Saddam Hussein did allow Iranian pilgrims back into Iraq in the mid-1990s, but it was a fraction of the current number and they were under the constant watch of his secret police.
Iraq signed an agreement with Iran in 2005 to allow up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims in each day. Most come by land and stay for a week. There are also three daily flights now ferrying Iranian pilgrims to Iraq. Tehran wants to send many more and to improve the infrastructure in the shrine cities to allow it.
Karbala, for instance, receives millions of visitors each year but has a maximum hotel capacity of 23,000, local officials say.
Nationalists and Sunni extremists aside, many Iraqis welcome Iranian pilgrims, whose business is vital for the economies of this shrine city, nearby Najaf and the area around the Shiite shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. And the government deploys its security forces liberally to protect them.
At the same time many Iraqis bristle at Iran’s perceived negative influence and meddling in internal politics, especially through the governing Iraqi Shiite parties that have been nurtured by Iran for years.
“Three-quarters of the power is in their hands,” said Haidar Abdul-Hassan, a shopkeeper in Karbala, referring to Iranians and their Iraqi allies.
Iraqi officials, eager not to be seen as beholden to Iran, become cagey and agitated when asked about Iranian influence in Karbala, insisting that it is minimal.
A closer look, though, reveals a different picture.
Behind the Imam Hussein shrine, through a dimly lighted hotel lobby and up a flight of stairs are the offices of Shamsa, a private Iranian company that has a virtual monopoly on Iranian pilgrimages to Iraq.
Shamsa gets to choose which Iraqi companies to deal with for the transportation, protection and accommodation of pilgrims. Almost all its partners are companies affiliated with Iraqi political parties close to Iran, according to those in the business. An example is the Ihsan private security company, which is close to the influential Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Tucked inside a warren of alleys in Karbala’s bazaar are the nondescript offices of Setad Bazsazi Atabat Aliyat. It is a company owned by the Iranian government, involved in shrine renovation worldwide and busy at work here.
An entry on a whiteboard reads: “Deliver five air-cooling units to Imam Hussein’s shrine.”
Glossy graphic designs of the contentious Karbala shrine renovation project hang on the walls. The project entails demolishing old homes, enlarging the plaza between the shrines and constructing two underground levels and shopping malls. Al Kawthar, the Iranian company awarded the design contract, is a Setad affiliate.
Both operate in all shrine cities. Projects in Karbala alone include a hospital, several large hotels and apartment complexes and an Iranian-run religious seminary.
In May 2008, Setad’s chairman told Iranian news media that Iran donated nearly $1 billion to equip and renovate Iraq’s shrines. Shrine officials in Karbala at the time said the number was “highly exaggerated.”
The United States military commander for the nine mainly Shiite provinces south of Baghdad, including Karbala, said recently that while Iran reduced but did not completely cut off its “lethal support” and arming of militias in Iraq, it had sought to increase its soft power through charities and economic and political organizations.
“Some of it is good,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Oates. “My concern is the degree to which they may seek to influence Iraqi politics.”
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran.
By SAM DAGHER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world/middleeast/31karbala.html?th&emc=th
KARBALA, Iraq — Over just two days, about 80 Iranian pilgrims were killed in April in suicide bombings in Iraq. But even though the pilgrims are clearly a favored target for Sunni extremists in Iraq, and though the threat continues, it seems nothing will keep the Iranians from coming here.
Iraq allows up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims to enter each day. The two countries have long had a complicated relationship.
The New York Times
Karbala’s economy depends on money spent by Iranians.
On a recent afternoon, a group of pilgrims from the Iranian city of Isfahan — many in tears and in a trancelike state — inched toward the shimmering golden-domed shrine ahead chanting “Hussein beloved” in Persian. Inside, Iranians jostled other pilgrims to grip the ornate gold and silver cagelike structure bearing the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, shrouded in green fabric embroidered with precious stones.
It is religious devotion that compels them to come. But Iran’s government is part of the equation, too, encouraging a greater Iranian presence in Iraq by supporting companies that control a lucrative segment of the pilgrimage business and renovating and maintaining Shiite shrines in Iraq.
While the United States and surrounding Arab nations worry about direct Iranian influence and support for armed groups, the pilgrimages present a small but important example of Iran’s rising soft power in Iraq. And it is something that makes Iraqis increasingly resentful.
Recently, the Interior Ministry banned Persian signs inside Karbala despite the fact most Iranian pilgrims speak no Arabic.
In April, Karbala’s residents demonstrated against the awarding of a contract to an Iranian company, Al Kawthar, to renovate the historic city center, including the area around the shrines of Imam Hussein and his brother Abu Fadhil al-Abbas, part of a $100-million project. Officials say they have been inundated with petitions against the Iranian proposal.
“We are Arabs, we will not accept to be colonized by anyone,” said Ali al-Hayawi, a hotel owner in Karbala catering to pilgrims, who is opposed to Iran’s involvement in the project. “We do not take orders from the Iranians.”
The dynamic in Karbala suggests that Iran may have a hard time exerting any deep sway among Iraqis, even among fellow Shiites, with suspicion playing out on several fronts. But at the national level, the relationship is more of a tug of war. The Iraqi government may want to keep Iran at arm’s length, but it also needs Iran economically and as a strategic ally.
Iran and Iraq have always had a contentious relationship, and it became more complicated with the American presence in Iraq.
The two predominantly Shiite countries share an 800-mile border and historical, cultural and trade ties, but attitudes on both sides remain colored both by ancient enmities and an eight-year war in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands dead or maimed. Saddam Hussein did allow Iranian pilgrims back into Iraq in the mid-1990s, but it was a fraction of the current number and they were under the constant watch of his secret police.
Iraq signed an agreement with Iran in 2005 to allow up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims in each day. Most come by land and stay for a week. There are also three daily flights now ferrying Iranian pilgrims to Iraq. Tehran wants to send many more and to improve the infrastructure in the shrine cities to allow it.
Karbala, for instance, receives millions of visitors each year but has a maximum hotel capacity of 23,000, local officials say.
Nationalists and Sunni extremists aside, many Iraqis welcome Iranian pilgrims, whose business is vital for the economies of this shrine city, nearby Najaf and the area around the Shiite shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. And the government deploys its security forces liberally to protect them.
At the same time many Iraqis bristle at Iran’s perceived negative influence and meddling in internal politics, especially through the governing Iraqi Shiite parties that have been nurtured by Iran for years.
“Three-quarters of the power is in their hands,” said Haidar Abdul-Hassan, a shopkeeper in Karbala, referring to Iranians and their Iraqi allies.
Iraqi officials, eager not to be seen as beholden to Iran, become cagey and agitated when asked about Iranian influence in Karbala, insisting that it is minimal.
A closer look, though, reveals a different picture.
Behind the Imam Hussein shrine, through a dimly lighted hotel lobby and up a flight of stairs are the offices of Shamsa, a private Iranian company that has a virtual monopoly on Iranian pilgrimages to Iraq.
Shamsa gets to choose which Iraqi companies to deal with for the transportation, protection and accommodation of pilgrims. Almost all its partners are companies affiliated with Iraqi political parties close to Iran, according to those in the business. An example is the Ihsan private security company, which is close to the influential Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Tucked inside a warren of alleys in Karbala’s bazaar are the nondescript offices of Setad Bazsazi Atabat Aliyat. It is a company owned by the Iranian government, involved in shrine renovation worldwide and busy at work here.
An entry on a whiteboard reads: “Deliver five air-cooling units to Imam Hussein’s shrine.”
Glossy graphic designs of the contentious Karbala shrine renovation project hang on the walls. The project entails demolishing old homes, enlarging the plaza between the shrines and constructing two underground levels and shopping malls. Al Kawthar, the Iranian company awarded the design contract, is a Setad affiliate.
Both operate in all shrine cities. Projects in Karbala alone include a hospital, several large hotels and apartment complexes and an Iranian-run religious seminary.
In May 2008, Setad’s chairman told Iranian news media that Iran donated nearly $1 billion to equip and renovate Iraq’s shrines. Shrine officials in Karbala at the time said the number was “highly exaggerated.”
The United States military commander for the nine mainly Shiite provinces south of Baghdad, including Karbala, said recently that while Iran reduced but did not completely cut off its “lethal support” and arming of militias in Iraq, it had sought to increase its soft power through charities and economic and political organizations.
“Some of it is good,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Oates. “My concern is the degree to which they may seek to influence Iraqi politics.”
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran.
Pakistan Army Claims Control of Main Swat Town
Pakistan Army Claims Control of Main Swat Town
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world/asia/31pstan.html?th&emc=th
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s military said Saturday that it had taken full control of Mingora, the most populous city in the Swat Valley, scoring a significant victory against Taliban forces three weeks after the start of an offensive in the area.
Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said at a news conference that the army was able to flush out militants, in part with the help of locals who showed soldiers Taliban hiding places in hotels and other buildings. The military estimates it has killed more than 1,000 militants since the campaign began on May 8.
Mingora, 100 miles northwest of Islamabad, the capital, is the most important city in Swat, a resort area that was overrun by the Taliban. The campaign is seen as a test of Pakistan’s resolve to fight its growing insurgency, which has spread substantially in the past two years, and which the United States says is compromising efforts to quell a similar insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan.
General Abbas announced the killing of two militant commanders, Abu Syed and Misbahuddin, but said it was unclear whether any more senior leaders had been killed or captured. “We are refraining from announcing or declaring until we have something in hand — some proof, some smoking gun,” General Abbas said.
Pakistan’s military has conducted two previous operations in Swat, but each involved fewer ground troops than this offensive, and they were criticized as causing too much harm to civilians without discernible gains against the Taliban.
Now, General Abbas said, the Pakistani public seems to be firmly behind the expanded offensive. “The military feels it’s in a much better position to finish the job because it has public support,” he said.
Soldiers’ deaths have been commemorated in emotional public ceremonies, and news channels have been praising troops with segments with headlines like “All the Right Moves.”
The fight in Swat has been against an enemy that is largely local, General Abbas said. Just 10 percent of the militants are from outside the valley, mostly from Central Asia and Afghanistan; a handful are from Waziristan, a tribal area in Pakistan’s northwest that is a no-go zone for the military and a stronghold for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The military estimates that there were 5,000 militants in the valley before the operation.
“It’s not a monolithic force,” General Abbas said.
Pakistan has said it plans to conduct its next campaign in Waziristan.
In Mingora, militants were hiding in hotels and other private buildings, posing as civilians, General Abbas said. They had converted some buildings into bunkers. Soldiers also found five tunnels, 100 feet long and 12 feet wide, filled with arms.
The fighting has displaced what the United Nations and Pakistani officials estimate to be as many as three million people, and Pakistan’s information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the government was responding as fast as it could to the humanitarian crisis.
The military has said it is not keeping track of civilian casualties in the campaign. General Abbas said Saturday that 81 soldiers had been killed and 250 wounded since its start.
A team of 21 doctors reached Mingora on Saturday to reopen the hospital there for the wounded who have been stuck in their homes, Mr. Kaira said. The gas has been turned on, and generators are being put in place to get the water supply working.
It will take two weeks to restore electricity, which has been off since the military operation began, General Abbas said. Twenty-five tons of rations have been sent for about 40,000 people who are assumed to be stranded in Swat, he said.
“Civilians are in desperate need of provisions,” General Abbas said.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world/asia/31pstan.html?th&emc=th
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s military said Saturday that it had taken full control of Mingora, the most populous city in the Swat Valley, scoring a significant victory against Taliban forces three weeks after the start of an offensive in the area.
Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said at a news conference that the army was able to flush out militants, in part with the help of locals who showed soldiers Taliban hiding places in hotels and other buildings. The military estimates it has killed more than 1,000 militants since the campaign began on May 8.
Mingora, 100 miles northwest of Islamabad, the capital, is the most important city in Swat, a resort area that was overrun by the Taliban. The campaign is seen as a test of Pakistan’s resolve to fight its growing insurgency, which has spread substantially in the past two years, and which the United States says is compromising efforts to quell a similar insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan.
General Abbas announced the killing of two militant commanders, Abu Syed and Misbahuddin, but said it was unclear whether any more senior leaders had been killed or captured. “We are refraining from announcing or declaring until we have something in hand — some proof, some smoking gun,” General Abbas said.
Pakistan’s military has conducted two previous operations in Swat, but each involved fewer ground troops than this offensive, and they were criticized as causing too much harm to civilians without discernible gains against the Taliban.
Now, General Abbas said, the Pakistani public seems to be firmly behind the expanded offensive. “The military feels it’s in a much better position to finish the job because it has public support,” he said.
Soldiers’ deaths have been commemorated in emotional public ceremonies, and news channels have been praising troops with segments with headlines like “All the Right Moves.”
The fight in Swat has been against an enemy that is largely local, General Abbas said. Just 10 percent of the militants are from outside the valley, mostly from Central Asia and Afghanistan; a handful are from Waziristan, a tribal area in Pakistan’s northwest that is a no-go zone for the military and a stronghold for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The military estimates that there were 5,000 militants in the valley before the operation.
“It’s not a monolithic force,” General Abbas said.
Pakistan has said it plans to conduct its next campaign in Waziristan.
In Mingora, militants were hiding in hotels and other private buildings, posing as civilians, General Abbas said. They had converted some buildings into bunkers. Soldiers also found five tunnels, 100 feet long and 12 feet wide, filled with arms.
The fighting has displaced what the United Nations and Pakistani officials estimate to be as many as three million people, and Pakistan’s information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the government was responding as fast as it could to the humanitarian crisis.
The military has said it is not keeping track of civilian casualties in the campaign. General Abbas said Saturday that 81 soldiers had been killed and 250 wounded since its start.
A team of 21 doctors reached Mingora on Saturday to reopen the hospital there for the wounded who have been stuck in their homes, Mr. Kaira said. The gas has been turned on, and generators are being put in place to get the water supply working.
It will take two weeks to restore electricity, which has been off since the military operation began, General Abbas said. Twenty-five tons of rations have been sent for about 40,000 people who are assumed to be stranded in Swat, he said.
“Civilians are in desperate need of provisions,” General Abbas said.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for U.S.
Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for U.S.
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31cyber.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
MELBOURNE, Fla. — The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.
The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.
Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.
The companies have been moving quickly to lock up the relatively small number of experts with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for “cyberninjas” at a time when other industries are shedding workers.
The changes are manifesting themselves in highly classified laboratories, where computer geeks in their 20s like to joke that they are hackers with security clearances.
At a Raytheon facility here south of the Kennedy Space Center, a hub of innovation in an earlier era, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers create tools to protect the Pentagon’s computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. Prizes like cappuccino machines and stacks of cash spur them on, and a gong heralds each major breakthrough.
The young engineers represent the new face of a war that President Obama described Friday as “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” The president said he would appoint a senior White House official to oversee the nation’s cybersecurity strategies.
Computer experts say the government is behind the curve in sealing off its networks from threats that are growing more persistent and sophisticated, with thousands of intrusions each day from organized criminals and legions of hackers for nations including Russia and China.
“Everybody’s attacking everybody,” said Scott Chase, a 30-year-old computer engineer who helps run the Raytheon unit here.
Mr. Chase, who wears his hair in a ponytail, and Terry Gillette, a 53-year-old former rocket engineer, ran SI Government Solutions before selling the company to Raytheon last year as the boom in the military’s cyberoperations accelerated.
The operation — tucked into several unmarked buildings behind an insurance office and a dentist’s office — is doing some of the most cutting-edge work, both in identifying weaknesses in Pentagon networks and in creating weapons for potential attacks.
Daniel D. Allen, who oversees work on intelligence systems for Northrop Grumman, estimated that federal spending on computer security now totals $10 billion each year, including classified programs. That is just a fraction of the government’s spending on weapons systems. But industry officials expect it to rise rapidly.
The military contractors are now in the enviable position of turning what they learned out of necessity — protecting the sensitive Pentagon data that sits on their own computers — into a lucrative business that could replace some of the revenue lost from cancellations of conventional weapons systems.
Executives at Lockheed Martin, which has long been the government’s largest information-technology contractor, also see the demand for greater computer security spreading to energy and health care agencies and the rest of the nation’s critical infrastructure. But for now, most companies remain focused on the national-security arena, where the hottest efforts involve anticipating how an enemy might attack and developing the resources to strike back.
Though even the existence of research on cyberweapons was once highly classified, the Air Force plans this year to award the first publicly announced contract for developing tools to break into enemy computers. The companies are also teaming up to build a National Cyber Range, a model of the Internet for testing advanced techniques.
Military experts said Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, which have long been major players in the Pentagon’s security efforts, are leading the push into offensive cyberwarfare, along with the Raytheon unit. This involves finding vulnerabilities in other countries’ computer systems and developing software tools to exploit them, either to steal sensitive information or disable the networks.
Mr. Chase and Mr. Gillette said the Raytheon unit, which has about 100 employees, grew out of a company they started with friends at Florida Institute of Technology that concentrated on helping software makers find flaws in their own products. Over the last several years, their focus shifted to the military and intelligence agencies, which wanted to use their analytic tools to detect vulnerabilities and intrusions previously unnoticed.
Like other contractors, the Raytheon teams set up “honey pots,” the equivalent of sting operations, to lure hackers into digital cul-de-sacs that mimic Pentagon Web sites. They then capture the attackers’ codes and create defenses for them.
And since most of the world’s computers run on the Windows or the Linux systems, their work has also provided a growing window into how to attack foreign networks in any cyberwar.
“It takes a nonconformist to excel at what we do,” said Mr. Gillette, a tanned surfing aficionado who looks like a 1950s hipster in his T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves.
The company, which would allow interviews with other employees only on the condition that their last names not be used because of security concerns, hired one of its top young workers, Dustin, after he won two major hacking contests and dropped out of college. “I always approach it like a game, and it’s been fun,” said Dustin, now 22.
Another engineer, known as Jolly, joined Raytheon in April after earning a master’s degree in computer security at DePaul University in Chicago. “You think defense contractors, and you think bureaucracy, and not necessarily a lot of interesting and challenging projects,” he said.
The Pentagon’s interest in cyberwarfare has reached “religious intensity,” said Daniel T. Kuehl, a military historian at the National Defense University. And the changes carry through to soldiers being trained to defend and attack computer and wireless networks out on the battlefield.
That shift can be seen in the remaking of organizations like the Association of Old Crows, a professional group that includes contractors and military personnel.
The Old Crows have deep roots in what has long been known as electronic warfare — the use of radar and radio technologies for jamming and deception.
But the financing for electronic warfare had slowed recently, prompting the Old Crows to set up a broader information-operations branch last year and establish a new trade journal to focus on cyberwarfare.
The career of Joel Harding, the director of the group’s Information Operations Institute, exemplifies the increasing role that computing and the Internet are playing in the military.
A 20-year veteran of military intelligence, Mr. Harding shifted in 1996 into one of the earliest commands that studied government-sponsored computer hacker programs. After leaving the military, he took a job as an analyst at SAIC, a large contractor developing computer applications for military and intelligence agencies.
Mr. Harding estimates that there are now 3,000 to 5,000 information operations specialists in the military and 50,000 to 70,000 soldiers involved in general computer operations. Adding specialists in electronic warfare, deception and other areas could bring the total number of information operations personnel to as many as 88,700, he said.
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/us/31cyber.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
MELBOURNE, Fla. — The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.
The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.
Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.
The companies have been moving quickly to lock up the relatively small number of experts with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for “cyberninjas” at a time when other industries are shedding workers.
The changes are manifesting themselves in highly classified laboratories, where computer geeks in their 20s like to joke that they are hackers with security clearances.
At a Raytheon facility here south of the Kennedy Space Center, a hub of innovation in an earlier era, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers create tools to protect the Pentagon’s computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. Prizes like cappuccino machines and stacks of cash spur them on, and a gong heralds each major breakthrough.
The young engineers represent the new face of a war that President Obama described Friday as “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” The president said he would appoint a senior White House official to oversee the nation’s cybersecurity strategies.
Computer experts say the government is behind the curve in sealing off its networks from threats that are growing more persistent and sophisticated, with thousands of intrusions each day from organized criminals and legions of hackers for nations including Russia and China.
“Everybody’s attacking everybody,” said Scott Chase, a 30-year-old computer engineer who helps run the Raytheon unit here.
Mr. Chase, who wears his hair in a ponytail, and Terry Gillette, a 53-year-old former rocket engineer, ran SI Government Solutions before selling the company to Raytheon last year as the boom in the military’s cyberoperations accelerated.
The operation — tucked into several unmarked buildings behind an insurance office and a dentist’s office — is doing some of the most cutting-edge work, both in identifying weaknesses in Pentagon networks and in creating weapons for potential attacks.
Daniel D. Allen, who oversees work on intelligence systems for Northrop Grumman, estimated that federal spending on computer security now totals $10 billion each year, including classified programs. That is just a fraction of the government’s spending on weapons systems. But industry officials expect it to rise rapidly.
The military contractors are now in the enviable position of turning what they learned out of necessity — protecting the sensitive Pentagon data that sits on their own computers — into a lucrative business that could replace some of the revenue lost from cancellations of conventional weapons systems.
Executives at Lockheed Martin, which has long been the government’s largest information-technology contractor, also see the demand for greater computer security spreading to energy and health care agencies and the rest of the nation’s critical infrastructure. But for now, most companies remain focused on the national-security arena, where the hottest efforts involve anticipating how an enemy might attack and developing the resources to strike back.
Though even the existence of research on cyberweapons was once highly classified, the Air Force plans this year to award the first publicly announced contract for developing tools to break into enemy computers. The companies are also teaming up to build a National Cyber Range, a model of the Internet for testing advanced techniques.
Military experts said Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, which have long been major players in the Pentagon’s security efforts, are leading the push into offensive cyberwarfare, along with the Raytheon unit. This involves finding vulnerabilities in other countries’ computer systems and developing software tools to exploit them, either to steal sensitive information or disable the networks.
Mr. Chase and Mr. Gillette said the Raytheon unit, which has about 100 employees, grew out of a company they started with friends at Florida Institute of Technology that concentrated on helping software makers find flaws in their own products. Over the last several years, their focus shifted to the military and intelligence agencies, which wanted to use their analytic tools to detect vulnerabilities and intrusions previously unnoticed.
Like other contractors, the Raytheon teams set up “honey pots,” the equivalent of sting operations, to lure hackers into digital cul-de-sacs that mimic Pentagon Web sites. They then capture the attackers’ codes and create defenses for them.
And since most of the world’s computers run on the Windows or the Linux systems, their work has also provided a growing window into how to attack foreign networks in any cyberwar.
“It takes a nonconformist to excel at what we do,” said Mr. Gillette, a tanned surfing aficionado who looks like a 1950s hipster in his T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves.
The company, which would allow interviews with other employees only on the condition that their last names not be used because of security concerns, hired one of its top young workers, Dustin, after he won two major hacking contests and dropped out of college. “I always approach it like a game, and it’s been fun,” said Dustin, now 22.
Another engineer, known as Jolly, joined Raytheon in April after earning a master’s degree in computer security at DePaul University in Chicago. “You think defense contractors, and you think bureaucracy, and not necessarily a lot of interesting and challenging projects,” he said.
The Pentagon’s interest in cyberwarfare has reached “religious intensity,” said Daniel T. Kuehl, a military historian at the National Defense University. And the changes carry through to soldiers being trained to defend and attack computer and wireless networks out on the battlefield.
That shift can be seen in the remaking of organizations like the Association of Old Crows, a professional group that includes contractors and military personnel.
The Old Crows have deep roots in what has long been known as electronic warfare — the use of radar and radio technologies for jamming and deception.
But the financing for electronic warfare had slowed recently, prompting the Old Crows to set up a broader information-operations branch last year and establish a new trade journal to focus on cyberwarfare.
The career of Joel Harding, the director of the group’s Information Operations Institute, exemplifies the increasing role that computing and the Internet are playing in the military.
A 20-year veteran of military intelligence, Mr. Harding shifted in 1996 into one of the earliest commands that studied government-sponsored computer hacker programs. After leaving the military, he took a job as an analyst at SAIC, a large contractor developing computer applications for military and intelligence agencies.
Mr. Harding estimates that there are now 3,000 to 5,000 information operations specialists in the military and 50,000 to 70,000 soldiers involved in general computer operations. Adding specialists in electronic warfare, deception and other areas could bring the total number of information operations personnel to as many as 88,700, he said.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Cheney Seeks Book Deal on Bush Years and More
Cheney Seeks Book Deal on Bush Years and More
By JIM RUTENBERG and MOTOKO RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/politics/23cheney.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — With his sustained blitz of television appearances and speeches, former Vice President Dick Cheney has established himself as perhaps the leading Republican voice against President Obama.
Not a bad time, then, to be in the market for a multimillion-dollar book contract.
Mr. Cheney is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations, a work that would add to what is already an unusually dense collection of post-Bush-presidency memoirs that will offer a collective rebuttal to the many harshly critical works released while the writers were in office and beyond.
Already working hard to meet publishers’ deadlines is an informal writers’ workshop of historic proportions: President George W. Bush; Laura Bush, the former first lady; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Karl Rove, the former presidential political mastermind.
Members of the Bush group are in regular contact as they seek to jog their memories, compare notes and trade stylistic tips in their new lives as authors, according to friends and current and former aides.
The coming crush of books reflects what former Bush officials describe as a desire to produce their own drafts of history after gritting their teeth for so long over the works of the journalists and disgruntled colleagues who penned the first, second and third drafts before them.
Adding to the eagerness is that Mr. Bush and his team had no vocal defender in the presidential campaign last year, when even the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, often attacked their stewardship.
“This is a group that kept their powder dry for a long time,” said Ed Gillespie, the former counselor to Mr. Bush, who stays in close contact with his colleagues. “People will get a firsthand account of the real nature of the decisions and the choices this administration had to make, and maybe there are some things people weren’t free to say at the time that they can say now that can shed some light on some things.”
Then again, the money isn’t bad, either.
A person familiar with discussions Mr. Cheney has had with publishers said he was seeking more than $2 million for his advance. That sum may prove hard to get in this economic climate, especially given his generally low approval ratings, which publishers view as a potential — but not certain — harbinger for sales.
While Mr. Bush got an advance estimated to be well into the millions for a look into 12 of his most important decisions, his payout is not believed to be as large as that of former President Bill Clinton for his memoirs, which drew a $15 million advance.
Mr. Rumsfeld was not paid an advance by his publisher, Sentinel, of Penguin Group USA, and has committed to donating his share of any proceeds to his nonprofit foundation. (Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Mr. Obama, for that matter, were represented in their contract talks by the Washington lawyer Robert B. Barnett.)
Mr. Cheney’s friends say he does not need the money and has made clear in his talks that he is eager to give a full accounting of his life in politics that will debunk his many critics.
According to a person familiar with a meeting that Mr. Cheney had with a publisher, the former vice president is proposing a memoir that would function not only as the story of his role in four Republican administrations but also as a history of “the entire Republican ascendancy going back to Nixon.” This person did not want to be named because of the confidentiality of the talks.
Mr. Cheney has talked with houses including HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, where Mary Matalin, his close friend and adviser, is editor in chief of Threshold, the conservative imprint that is also publishing Mr. Rove’s book. Marji Ross, president and publisher of the conservative publisher Regnery, said she and others at the house had talked informally to Mr. Cheney and Mr. Barnett. But Ms. Matalin’s long history with Mr. Cheney has made her imprint a logical home for his book.
John Hannah, a senior adviser to Mr. Cheney at the White House, said that when he spoke to Mr. Cheney a few weeks ago the former vice president was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between his life story and his hotly debated tenure serving with Mr. Bush. “The question was, Do you do the 40 years in Washington, given all his experiences in different jobs and perspectives?” Mr. Hannah said. “Or do you need to do something fairly quickly to answer and to discuss the last eight years?”
As the talks continue, Mr. Cheney is writing out his thoughts longhand in an office above his garage in Virginia and is in frequent contact with the other newly minted Bush administration authors, right on up to Mr. Bush.
A report by U.S. News & World Report about a visit by Mr. Cheney to Mr. Rumsfeld’s Washington office in March prompted speculation that they were trying to match up their stories, which a Rumsfeld spokesman, Keith Urbahn, denied. He said there was likely to be a greater divergence of views in the coming books than some might expect.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who is working almost full time on his book, feeding dictation to aides culling his personal papers, often differed with counterweights in other departments, like Ms. Rice. “There’s a great deal of truth to the adage of where you stand is where you sit,” Mr. Urbahn said.
Ms. Rice has a three-book deal with Crown, Mr. Bush’s publisher. Douglas Brinkley, the historian, said she indicated to him late last year that she deemed it appropriate to wait for the president to publish his book, scheduled for 2010, before she published hers on the White House.
Jim Rutenberg reported from Washington, and Motoko Rich from New York. Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington.
By JIM RUTENBERG and MOTOKO RICH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/politics/23cheney.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — With his sustained blitz of television appearances and speeches, former Vice President Dick Cheney has established himself as perhaps the leading Republican voice against President Obama.
Not a bad time, then, to be in the market for a multimillion-dollar book contract.
Mr. Cheney is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations, a work that would add to what is already an unusually dense collection of post-Bush-presidency memoirs that will offer a collective rebuttal to the many harshly critical works released while the writers were in office and beyond.
Already working hard to meet publishers’ deadlines is an informal writers’ workshop of historic proportions: President George W. Bush; Laura Bush, the former first lady; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Karl Rove, the former presidential political mastermind.
Members of the Bush group are in regular contact as they seek to jog their memories, compare notes and trade stylistic tips in their new lives as authors, according to friends and current and former aides.
The coming crush of books reflects what former Bush officials describe as a desire to produce their own drafts of history after gritting their teeth for so long over the works of the journalists and disgruntled colleagues who penned the first, second and third drafts before them.
Adding to the eagerness is that Mr. Bush and his team had no vocal defender in the presidential campaign last year, when even the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, often attacked their stewardship.
“This is a group that kept their powder dry for a long time,” said Ed Gillespie, the former counselor to Mr. Bush, who stays in close contact with his colleagues. “People will get a firsthand account of the real nature of the decisions and the choices this administration had to make, and maybe there are some things people weren’t free to say at the time that they can say now that can shed some light on some things.”
Then again, the money isn’t bad, either.
A person familiar with discussions Mr. Cheney has had with publishers said he was seeking more than $2 million for his advance. That sum may prove hard to get in this economic climate, especially given his generally low approval ratings, which publishers view as a potential — but not certain — harbinger for sales.
While Mr. Bush got an advance estimated to be well into the millions for a look into 12 of his most important decisions, his payout is not believed to be as large as that of former President Bill Clinton for his memoirs, which drew a $15 million advance.
Mr. Rumsfeld was not paid an advance by his publisher, Sentinel, of Penguin Group USA, and has committed to donating his share of any proceeds to his nonprofit foundation. (Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Mr. Obama, for that matter, were represented in their contract talks by the Washington lawyer Robert B. Barnett.)
Mr. Cheney’s friends say he does not need the money and has made clear in his talks that he is eager to give a full accounting of his life in politics that will debunk his many critics.
According to a person familiar with a meeting that Mr. Cheney had with a publisher, the former vice president is proposing a memoir that would function not only as the story of his role in four Republican administrations but also as a history of “the entire Republican ascendancy going back to Nixon.” This person did not want to be named because of the confidentiality of the talks.
Mr. Cheney has talked with houses including HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, where Mary Matalin, his close friend and adviser, is editor in chief of Threshold, the conservative imprint that is also publishing Mr. Rove’s book. Marji Ross, president and publisher of the conservative publisher Regnery, said she and others at the house had talked informally to Mr. Cheney and Mr. Barnett. But Ms. Matalin’s long history with Mr. Cheney has made her imprint a logical home for his book.
John Hannah, a senior adviser to Mr. Cheney at the White House, said that when he spoke to Mr. Cheney a few weeks ago the former vice president was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between his life story and his hotly debated tenure serving with Mr. Bush. “The question was, Do you do the 40 years in Washington, given all his experiences in different jobs and perspectives?” Mr. Hannah said. “Or do you need to do something fairly quickly to answer and to discuss the last eight years?”
As the talks continue, Mr. Cheney is writing out his thoughts longhand in an office above his garage in Virginia and is in frequent contact with the other newly minted Bush administration authors, right on up to Mr. Bush.
A report by U.S. News & World Report about a visit by Mr. Cheney to Mr. Rumsfeld’s Washington office in March prompted speculation that they were trying to match up their stories, which a Rumsfeld spokesman, Keith Urbahn, denied. He said there was likely to be a greater divergence of views in the coming books than some might expect.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who is working almost full time on his book, feeding dictation to aides culling his personal papers, often differed with counterweights in other departments, like Ms. Rice. “There’s a great deal of truth to the adage of where you stand is where you sit,” Mr. Urbahn said.
Ms. Rice has a three-book deal with Crown, Mr. Bush’s publisher. Douglas Brinkley, the historian, said she indicated to him late last year that she deemed it appropriate to wait for the president to publish his book, scheduled for 2010, before she published hers on the White House.
Jim Rutenberg reported from Washington, and Motoko Rich from New York. Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington.
First Death for Washington Assisted-Suicide Law
First Death for Washington Assisted-Suicide Law
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/23suicide.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
SEATTLE — A woman with pancreatic cancer has become the first person to die under a law passed last year allowing doctor-assisted suicide in Washington, according to an advocacy group that pushed for the law.
The woman, Linda Fleming, 66, of Sequim, Wash., died Thursday evening after taking lethal medication prescribed by a doctor under the law, according to a news release by the group, Compassion and Choices of Washington. The release said Ms. Fleming received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month ago, and “she was told she was actively dying.”
Ms. Fleming was quoted in the release as saying: “I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death.”
In November, voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, 58 percent to 42 percent, making Washington the second state — after Oregon — to allow assisted suicide. The laws in both states have been deeply controversial, particularly among religious groups. Washington passed its law after the United States Supreme Court in 2006 rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block Oregon’s law, which took effect in 1998.
In Montana, a state judge ruled in December that doctor-assisted suicide was legal under the state’s Constitution, but the state is appealing that decision.
Steve Hopcraft, a spokesman for Compassion and Choices, said the group was “not leading a campaign in any other state right now.”
The Washington and Oregon laws allow terminally ill patients who are at least 18 and have been found mentally competent to self-administer lethal drugs under the prescription of a doctor.
In Oregon, 401 people used the law through 2008. Since the law took effect in Washington in March, six prescriptions for lethal medication have been dispensed, but a spokesman for the State Department of Health, Donn Moyer, said it had not received any forms saying a patient had used the medication. Under the law, doctors who write such a prescription have 30 days to report that it had been used.
Mr. Moyer, saying privacy laws prevented the state from providing information about a specific death, said he could not confirm Ms. Fleming’s death.
In Oregon, not everyone who received a prescription has taken the drugs.
Some critics fear that physician-assisted suicide will pressure people with terminal illnesses who have low incomes or are disabled to end their lives to avoid becoming a financial burden to loved ones. Supporters cite studies that they say have refuted that idea.
Ms. Fleming, who was divorced, filed for bankruptcy in 2007 with $5,800 in credit card debt, according to court records and a lawyer who had represented her, Hugh Haffner.
Mr. Haffner said that when she filed for bankruptcy, Ms. Fleming, a former social worker, had been unable to work because of a disability and lived in subsidized housing on $643 in monthly disability checks.
Virginia Peterhansen, who said she had befriended Ms. Fleming about six months ago through a book group, said Ms. Fleming bought a 1982 Oldsmobile station wagon days before she was told she had cancer and that she had hoped to learn to contra dance.
Robb Miller, the executive director of Compassion and Choices of Washington, said that he had spoken to Ms. Fleming and that, although he was unaware of her bankruptcy filing, her situation presented “none of the red flags” that might have given his group pause in supporting her. He said Ms. Fleming’s two children and her former husband “were involved and supported her choice.”
The family could not be reached for comment.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/23suicide.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
SEATTLE — A woman with pancreatic cancer has become the first person to die under a law passed last year allowing doctor-assisted suicide in Washington, according to an advocacy group that pushed for the law.
The woman, Linda Fleming, 66, of Sequim, Wash., died Thursday evening after taking lethal medication prescribed by a doctor under the law, according to a news release by the group, Compassion and Choices of Washington. The release said Ms. Fleming received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month ago, and “she was told she was actively dying.”
Ms. Fleming was quoted in the release as saying: “I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death.”
In November, voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, 58 percent to 42 percent, making Washington the second state — after Oregon — to allow assisted suicide. The laws in both states have been deeply controversial, particularly among religious groups. Washington passed its law after the United States Supreme Court in 2006 rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block Oregon’s law, which took effect in 1998.
In Montana, a state judge ruled in December that doctor-assisted suicide was legal under the state’s Constitution, but the state is appealing that decision.
Steve Hopcraft, a spokesman for Compassion and Choices, said the group was “not leading a campaign in any other state right now.”
The Washington and Oregon laws allow terminally ill patients who are at least 18 and have been found mentally competent to self-administer lethal drugs under the prescription of a doctor.
In Oregon, 401 people used the law through 2008. Since the law took effect in Washington in March, six prescriptions for lethal medication have been dispensed, but a spokesman for the State Department of Health, Donn Moyer, said it had not received any forms saying a patient had used the medication. Under the law, doctors who write such a prescription have 30 days to report that it had been used.
Mr. Moyer, saying privacy laws prevented the state from providing information about a specific death, said he could not confirm Ms. Fleming’s death.
In Oregon, not everyone who received a prescription has taken the drugs.
Some critics fear that physician-assisted suicide will pressure people with terminal illnesses who have low incomes or are disabled to end their lives to avoid becoming a financial burden to loved ones. Supporters cite studies that they say have refuted that idea.
Ms. Fleming, who was divorced, filed for bankruptcy in 2007 with $5,800 in credit card debt, according to court records and a lawyer who had represented her, Hugh Haffner.
Mr. Haffner said that when she filed for bankruptcy, Ms. Fleming, a former social worker, had been unable to work because of a disability and lived in subsidized housing on $643 in monthly disability checks.
Virginia Peterhansen, who said she had befriended Ms. Fleming about six months ago through a book group, said Ms. Fleming bought a 1982 Oldsmobile station wagon days before she was told she had cancer and that she had hoped to learn to contra dance.
Robb Miller, the executive director of Compassion and Choices of Washington, said that he had spoken to Ms. Fleming and that, although he was unaware of her bankruptcy filing, her situation presented “none of the red flags” that might have given his group pause in supporting her. He said Ms. Fleming’s two children and her former husband “were involved and supported her choice.”
The family could not be reached for comment.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Ridge disagrees with Cheney
Ridge disagrees with Cheney
By Alexander Mooney
Copyright by CNN News
May 22, 2009 Posted: 03:52 PM ET
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/22/ridge-i-disagree-with-cheney/
(CNN) — Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told CNN former Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated charge the Obama administration has made the country less safe is wrong.
"Yeah, I disagree with Dick Cheney," the Pennsylvania Republican and former Bush administration official told CNN's John King, adding he "does not" think the country is more vulnerable to an attack under President Obama.
Ridge's comments come after both Obama and Cheney gave dueling speeches on national security, during which the president sharply condemned Bush administration interrogation practices while Cheney vigorously defended them.
In the interview with CNN, set to air in full on State of The Union with John King Sunday, Ridge said he disagrees with "the approach both men are taking."
"It's just the whole notion of a Republican vice president giving a speech after the incumbent Democratic president," he said. "It's gotta go beyond the politics of either party."
The former Pennsylvania governor also took issue with a portion of Obama's speech, during which he said some Bush national security decisions were based on "fear, rather than foresight."
"I'm surprised that President Obama, who I really, truly believe knows better, would make such a statement," said Ridge. "The men and women in charge of America's security, whether they're military, or the intelligence community — the president, the vice president, the attorney general, the FBI director — did everything they could at the time to prevent another attack on America. And did it consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law."
Ridge, who served as the country's first homeland security secretary in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, said he's "disappointed in the president" for spending time criticizing past actions of the Bush administration."
"He keeps looking backwards to justify what he's doing now and I don't think at the end of the day — I think that becomes more politics than policy, and I don't think it's the kind of approach that we need to bring America together on this very important issue," he said.
By Alexander Mooney
Copyright by CNN News
May 22, 2009 Posted: 03:52 PM ET
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/22/ridge-i-disagree-with-cheney/
(CNN) — Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told CNN former Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated charge the Obama administration has made the country less safe is wrong.
"Yeah, I disagree with Dick Cheney," the Pennsylvania Republican and former Bush administration official told CNN's John King, adding he "does not" think the country is more vulnerable to an attack under President Obama.
Ridge's comments come after both Obama and Cheney gave dueling speeches on national security, during which the president sharply condemned Bush administration interrogation practices while Cheney vigorously defended them.
In the interview with CNN, set to air in full on State of The Union with John King Sunday, Ridge said he disagrees with "the approach both men are taking."
"It's just the whole notion of a Republican vice president giving a speech after the incumbent Democratic president," he said. "It's gotta go beyond the politics of either party."
The former Pennsylvania governor also took issue with a portion of Obama's speech, during which he said some Bush national security decisions were based on "fear, rather than foresight."
"I'm surprised that President Obama, who I really, truly believe knows better, would make such a statement," said Ridge. "The men and women in charge of America's security, whether they're military, or the intelligence community — the president, the vice president, the attorney general, the FBI director — did everything they could at the time to prevent another attack on America. And did it consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law."
Ridge, who served as the country's first homeland security secretary in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, said he's "disappointed in the president" for spending time criticizing past actions of the Bush administration."
"He keeps looking backwards to justify what he's doing now and I don't think at the end of the day — I think that becomes more politics than policy, and I don't think it's the kind of approach that we need to bring America together on this very important issue," he said.
Chicago Sun-Times Editorial - State pols all talk, no action on reform/ Chicago Tribune Editorials - You call this reform? AND How it works
Chicago Sun-Times Editorial - State pols all talk, no action on reform
copyright by THe Chicago Sun-Times
May 22, 2009
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1586269,CST-EDT-edit22a.article
Only in Illinois would politicians talk about reform and do the exact opposite.
Springfield politicians talk about putting limits on what fat-cat contributors can donate to them.
But in the process they craft a proposal that only increases the big-money power of legislative leaders.
Springfield politicians talk about beefing up the state's woefully weak law that is supposed to give voters access to information their governments would rather keep hidden.
In reality, they only want to water down real reform.
And amid all this so-called reform, how do they plan to pay for many state construction projects?
By making video poker machines legal across the state.
That move would put hundreds of millions of dollars into the state's pocket, sure, but it would also enrich the gangsters who control many of those machines in the Chicago area.
You can't make this stuff up.
• • Consider campaign contribution limits. Right now, Illinois has no contribution limits for state politicians, but Gov. Quinn's Illinois Reform Commission has suggested limits in line with established federal campaign donation limits.
The commission also has recommended capping the amount the state's top political leaders can donate from their huge war chests to local races. Those big donations from the top pols -- and here we're talking about House Speaker Mike Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton -- create a legion of legislators beholden to them.
So, what happened?
Madigan, Cullerton, et al, have decided they might be willing to enact campaign contribution limits on individuals, businesses and unions -- but limits that are so high and generous they would be virtually meaningless. And, of course, Madigan, Cullerton, et al, show absolutely no willingness to limit their own ability to shower money on their fellow politicians.
In short, under the ruse of reform, our state's political leaders -- especially Madigan and Cullerton -- would effectively increase their own power by marginally reining in campaign contributions by everybody else, except themselves.
Nifty trick, no?
• • If you wonder why we need a better law to force local governments to release public information, consider a court case decided Thursday.
In 2006, a Wheaton resident submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of his local school superintendent's employment contract, just the kind of document the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA, is supposed to cover. The school district told the citizen, Mark Stern, to take a hike.
Stern sought an opinion from the Illinois attorney general's office, which ruled the document should be released. The district still brushed him off. Stern sued, and the school district fought him in court for three years.
On Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court stated the obvious: The contract needs to be released.
Stern's legal battle shows the problem with the law. Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office is free to issue decisions on FOIA battles to help ordinary citizens, but unless those decisions are binding, government agencies can blow them off.
Making those decisions legally binding is a key reform. Any FOIA "improvement" without it is no reform at all, no matter what the politicians try to sell you.
• • Speaking of goofy claims, consider the argument being made by some supporters of legalizing video poker. Once the machines are ringing and rattling in corner bars across the state, they say, the machines' operators and distributors will be required to pass criminal background checks -- and that will regulate the mob right out of the business.
Last time we checked, though, mobsters don't apply for licenses in their own names. They use front people with clean records.
Why do politicians think they can get away with this nonsense?
Because in Illinois they always have -- and will again, unless you get good and steamed.
Here's what you need to do:
Call House Speaker Mike Madigan at (217) 782-5350 and Senate President John Cullerton at (217) 782-2728.
Tell their folks that come election time, you'll work against them and the local candidates they support, unless you get real reform.
It's now or never.
Chicago Tribune Editorial - You call this reform?
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
May 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0522edit1may22,0,3468772.story
"Dear Good Government Supporter," begins the letter from Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. "On Wednesday, the Illinois House passed another in a series of bills that will comprise the most significant and far-reaching reform package that has been enacted in several years."
The bill Madigan refers to would eliminate the legal mechanism that awards automatic pay raises to lawmakers unless both houses vote to reject them, something they rarely get around to doing. Only in Illinois can you pass a law that holds lawmakers accountable for giving themselves a raise and call it reform. But we'll take it.
Elsewhere on Wednesday, we got a good look at what the rest of this "significant and far-reaching reform package" might look like. It is, in a word, appalling.
House and Senate leaders began circulating a draft rewrite of the state's toothless Freedom of Information Act. The current law, among the worst in the nation, provides government officials with a mother lode of legal excuses to withhold information from the public. The version drafted by legislative staffers may be even worse. Don Craven, acting director of the Illinois Press Association, says that given a choice between current law and the new-and-improved version he saw Wednesday, he'll take the old one. We're with him.
In between those versions was a good bill, drafted by staffers for Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan. With input from the Illinois Reform Commission, the press association, law-enforcement agencies, municipalities and government watchdog groups, the attorney general's office negotiated a compromise that nobody loved but most could support. That goes for us too.
That package would remove roadblocks and close loopholes now invoked to withhold public records. It includes penalties for governments that ignore the law. It would establish a "public access counselor" to issue binding opinions in records disputes between citizens and governments. It wasn't perfect, but it was significantly better than the status quo -- until the legislative staff got ahold of it.
Out came the criminal penalties. Back in went the long laundry list of technical exemptions. Out came the language meant to put some teeth in the deadlines that public officials routinely ignore when dealing with records requests.
Out came this sentence: "Disclosure of information that bears on the public duties of public employees and officials shall not be considered an invasion of personal privacy." If a cop cracks up the cruiser, in other words, it's none of your business.
The working bill also would allow -- some would say encourage -- a public body that keeps records electronically to release them as printouts, even if the requester asks for an electronic copy instead. Why would they want to? Because paper documents can't be searched electronically, are harder to share and can be prohibitively costly because the requester must pay by the page. This provision is a blatant attempt to thwart transparency, not to foster it. This is not our idea of reform.
Perhaps the most nakedly self-serving change: In the version of the bill circulating Wednesday, the language had been tweaked to give the public access counselor authority to resolve complaints involving the executive branch only.
That sort of chutzpah has Mike Madigan written all over it. The surprise is that he would torpedo a bill in which his daughter, the attorney general, had invested so much time and political capital. It seems clear, though, where the speaker stands: He's no champion of government transparency.
We could go on and on, Dear Good Government Supporter, but you get the picture. "The most significant and far-reaching reform package that has been enacted in several years" is a pretty low bar, when you think about it. There are a lot of excellent reform proposals in the hopper, but the session is winding down and most of them seem to be getting worse instead of better.
So when lawmakers boast about passing a law to end passive pay raises, it's important to recognize the gesture for what it is: They're throwing you a bone. Make sure you let them know you want more, much more, or you won't get it.
They're not looking out for you, they're looking out for themselves.
Chicago Tribune Editorial - How it works
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
May 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0522edit2may22,0,3861989.story
It's crunch time in Springfield, that special season when good intentions fall by the wayside and late starters burst onto the scene and streak across the finish line. Anything can happen.
Those ethics proposals drafted by the Illinois Reform Commission? Gov. Pat Quinn expects they'll be voted on at "15 minutes to midnight" on adjournment day, and we don't doubt it. As you can see from the editorial above, lawmakers' vows to clean up state government are fading to hems and haws as the deadline nears. Watch closely.
A $29 billion program to build and rebuild roads, schools, bridges and transit projects, though, suddenly sprouted legs. The House and Senate this week approved a bunch of taxes -- plus legalized video gambling -- to finance it.
Video gambling was a non-starter for years. But last week, a bill to make it legal suddenly came steaming out of a House committee. The plan is to allow video games like poker and blackjack in bars, restaurants, truck stops and fraternal lodges and tax the proceeds. That would raise $200 million or $375 million or even $600 million a year, depending on whose rosy projection you like.
This plan has been panned in years past. Critics call video poker "the crack cocaine of gambling," and even people who think casinos are a fine idea don't necessarily want gaming stations sprinkled throughout their neighborhoods. Illegal video gambling is already a thriving mob enterprise. Lawmakers have been smart to steer clear of it.
But now it's video poker to the rescue. Where the heck did that come from? It's "another one of those remarkable Springfield coincidences," Greg Hinz at Crain's Chicago Business recently wrote.
Joe Berrios is the chief lobbyist for the video poker industry. He's also one of three members of the Cook County property tax appeals board.
House Speaker Michael Madigan's law firm specializes in property tax appeals.
Senate President John Cullerton is also an attorney. He specializes in tax appeals too.
The fate of video poker largely rested in their hands.
Does anyone see a conflict of interest here?
Not Berrios: The proposal has been "out there for years;" he's lobbied "everyone" in Springfield and the video poker industry pays him only about $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he told Hinz.
Oh, one other thing that comes from Hinz's very productive blog. Madigan has bottled up a bill that would reduce the number of votes needed to override a veto by the president of the Cook County Board. The bill passed the Senate 57-0. Yes, it would allow the County Board to top Todd Stroger and kill the egregious county sales tax increase.
But it can't even get to a vote in the House.
Now what's going on there? Why would Madigan keep this from a vote?
"If you look through Mr. Madigan's financial disclosure reports, the contributions from county employees almost leap off the page," Hinz writes.
This is how things work, and how people think, in Springfield. Which is why we're pushing so hard to pass meaningful ethics reform.
The smart money says video poker is coming. Ethics reform, though, is a much longer shot.
copyright by THe Chicago Sun-Times
May 22, 2009
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/1586269,CST-EDT-edit22a.article
Only in Illinois would politicians talk about reform and do the exact opposite.
Springfield politicians talk about putting limits on what fat-cat contributors can donate to them.
But in the process they craft a proposal that only increases the big-money power of legislative leaders.
Springfield politicians talk about beefing up the state's woefully weak law that is supposed to give voters access to information their governments would rather keep hidden.
In reality, they only want to water down real reform.
And amid all this so-called reform, how do they plan to pay for many state construction projects?
By making video poker machines legal across the state.
That move would put hundreds of millions of dollars into the state's pocket, sure, but it would also enrich the gangsters who control many of those machines in the Chicago area.
You can't make this stuff up.
• • Consider campaign contribution limits. Right now, Illinois has no contribution limits for state politicians, but Gov. Quinn's Illinois Reform Commission has suggested limits in line with established federal campaign donation limits.
The commission also has recommended capping the amount the state's top political leaders can donate from their huge war chests to local races. Those big donations from the top pols -- and here we're talking about House Speaker Mike Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton -- create a legion of legislators beholden to them.
So, what happened?
Madigan, Cullerton, et al, have decided they might be willing to enact campaign contribution limits on individuals, businesses and unions -- but limits that are so high and generous they would be virtually meaningless. And, of course, Madigan, Cullerton, et al, show absolutely no willingness to limit their own ability to shower money on their fellow politicians.
In short, under the ruse of reform, our state's political leaders -- especially Madigan and Cullerton -- would effectively increase their own power by marginally reining in campaign contributions by everybody else, except themselves.
Nifty trick, no?
• • If you wonder why we need a better law to force local governments to release public information, consider a court case decided Thursday.
In 2006, a Wheaton resident submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of his local school superintendent's employment contract, just the kind of document the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA, is supposed to cover. The school district told the citizen, Mark Stern, to take a hike.
Stern sought an opinion from the Illinois attorney general's office, which ruled the document should be released. The district still brushed him off. Stern sued, and the school district fought him in court for three years.
On Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court stated the obvious: The contract needs to be released.
Stern's legal battle shows the problem with the law. Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office is free to issue decisions on FOIA battles to help ordinary citizens, but unless those decisions are binding, government agencies can blow them off.
Making those decisions legally binding is a key reform. Any FOIA "improvement" without it is no reform at all, no matter what the politicians try to sell you.
• • Speaking of goofy claims, consider the argument being made by some supporters of legalizing video poker. Once the machines are ringing and rattling in corner bars across the state, they say, the machines' operators and distributors will be required to pass criminal background checks -- and that will regulate the mob right out of the business.
Last time we checked, though, mobsters don't apply for licenses in their own names. They use front people with clean records.
Why do politicians think they can get away with this nonsense?
Because in Illinois they always have -- and will again, unless you get good and steamed.
Here's what you need to do:
Call House Speaker Mike Madigan at (217) 782-5350 and Senate President John Cullerton at (217) 782-2728.
Tell their folks that come election time, you'll work against them and the local candidates they support, unless you get real reform.
It's now or never.
Chicago Tribune Editorial - You call this reform?
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
May 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0522edit1may22,0,3468772.story
"Dear Good Government Supporter," begins the letter from Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. "On Wednesday, the Illinois House passed another in a series of bills that will comprise the most significant and far-reaching reform package that has been enacted in several years."
The bill Madigan refers to would eliminate the legal mechanism that awards automatic pay raises to lawmakers unless both houses vote to reject them, something they rarely get around to doing. Only in Illinois can you pass a law that holds lawmakers accountable for giving themselves a raise and call it reform. But we'll take it.
Elsewhere on Wednesday, we got a good look at what the rest of this "significant and far-reaching reform package" might look like. It is, in a word, appalling.
House and Senate leaders began circulating a draft rewrite of the state's toothless Freedom of Information Act. The current law, among the worst in the nation, provides government officials with a mother lode of legal excuses to withhold information from the public. The version drafted by legislative staffers may be even worse. Don Craven, acting director of the Illinois Press Association, says that given a choice between current law and the new-and-improved version he saw Wednesday, he'll take the old one. We're with him.
In between those versions was a good bill, drafted by staffers for Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan. With input from the Illinois Reform Commission, the press association, law-enforcement agencies, municipalities and government watchdog groups, the attorney general's office negotiated a compromise that nobody loved but most could support. That goes for us too.
That package would remove roadblocks and close loopholes now invoked to withhold public records. It includes penalties for governments that ignore the law. It would establish a "public access counselor" to issue binding opinions in records disputes between citizens and governments. It wasn't perfect, but it was significantly better than the status quo -- until the legislative staff got ahold of it.
Out came the criminal penalties. Back in went the long laundry list of technical exemptions. Out came the language meant to put some teeth in the deadlines that public officials routinely ignore when dealing with records requests.
Out came this sentence: "Disclosure of information that bears on the public duties of public employees and officials shall not be considered an invasion of personal privacy." If a cop cracks up the cruiser, in other words, it's none of your business.
The working bill also would allow -- some would say encourage -- a public body that keeps records electronically to release them as printouts, even if the requester asks for an electronic copy instead. Why would they want to? Because paper documents can't be searched electronically, are harder to share and can be prohibitively costly because the requester must pay by the page. This provision is a blatant attempt to thwart transparency, not to foster it. This is not our idea of reform.
Perhaps the most nakedly self-serving change: In the version of the bill circulating Wednesday, the language had been tweaked to give the public access counselor authority to resolve complaints involving the executive branch only.
That sort of chutzpah has Mike Madigan written all over it. The surprise is that he would torpedo a bill in which his daughter, the attorney general, had invested so much time and political capital. It seems clear, though, where the speaker stands: He's no champion of government transparency.
We could go on and on, Dear Good Government Supporter, but you get the picture. "The most significant and far-reaching reform package that has been enacted in several years" is a pretty low bar, when you think about it. There are a lot of excellent reform proposals in the hopper, but the session is winding down and most of them seem to be getting worse instead of better.
So when lawmakers boast about passing a law to end passive pay raises, it's important to recognize the gesture for what it is: They're throwing you a bone. Make sure you let them know you want more, much more, or you won't get it.
They're not looking out for you, they're looking out for themselves.
Chicago Tribune Editorial - How it works
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
May 22, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0522edit2may22,0,3861989.story
It's crunch time in Springfield, that special season when good intentions fall by the wayside and late starters burst onto the scene and streak across the finish line. Anything can happen.
Those ethics proposals drafted by the Illinois Reform Commission? Gov. Pat Quinn expects they'll be voted on at "15 minutes to midnight" on adjournment day, and we don't doubt it. As you can see from the editorial above, lawmakers' vows to clean up state government are fading to hems and haws as the deadline nears. Watch closely.
A $29 billion program to build and rebuild roads, schools, bridges and transit projects, though, suddenly sprouted legs. The House and Senate this week approved a bunch of taxes -- plus legalized video gambling -- to finance it.
Video gambling was a non-starter for years. But last week, a bill to make it legal suddenly came steaming out of a House committee. The plan is to allow video games like poker and blackjack in bars, restaurants, truck stops and fraternal lodges and tax the proceeds. That would raise $200 million or $375 million or even $600 million a year, depending on whose rosy projection you like.
This plan has been panned in years past. Critics call video poker "the crack cocaine of gambling," and even people who think casinos are a fine idea don't necessarily want gaming stations sprinkled throughout their neighborhoods. Illegal video gambling is already a thriving mob enterprise. Lawmakers have been smart to steer clear of it.
But now it's video poker to the rescue. Where the heck did that come from? It's "another one of those remarkable Springfield coincidences," Greg Hinz at Crain's Chicago Business recently wrote.
Joe Berrios is the chief lobbyist for the video poker industry. He's also one of three members of the Cook County property tax appeals board.
House Speaker Michael Madigan's law firm specializes in property tax appeals.
Senate President John Cullerton is also an attorney. He specializes in tax appeals too.
The fate of video poker largely rested in their hands.
Does anyone see a conflict of interest here?
Not Berrios: The proposal has been "out there for years;" he's lobbied "everyone" in Springfield and the video poker industry pays him only about $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he told Hinz.
Oh, one other thing that comes from Hinz's very productive blog. Madigan has bottled up a bill that would reduce the number of votes needed to override a veto by the president of the Cook County Board. The bill passed the Senate 57-0. Yes, it would allow the County Board to top Todd Stroger and kill the egregious county sales tax increase.
But it can't even get to a vote in the House.
Now what's going on there? Why would Madigan keep this from a vote?
"If you look through Mr. Madigan's financial disclosure reports, the contributions from county employees almost leap off the page," Hinz writes.
This is how things work, and how people think, in Springfield. Which is why we're pushing so hard to pass meaningful ethics reform.
The smart money says video poker is coming. Ethics reform, though, is a much longer shot.
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