I Won’t Say It
Jobs with Little Mental Challenge May Up Alzheimer’s
People who spent most of their lives in jobs that involve little brain work appear more likely to eventually develop Alzheimer’s disease, according to new study findings released Monday.
I just wanted to share with you another example of the media unquestioningly adopting bitchy, Republican snark to the detriment of…well, everyone.
Here’s Karen Tumulty in Time:
Bush strategists dismiss those gains by Kerry as a postconvention blip and predict they will soon be erased by what voters see of the Democratic Senator now that he is back in the fray. The real Kerry, they snickered, is the one who asserted last week that he could fight “a more sensitive war on terror” — a statement that couldn’t have sounded more dainty if he had uttered it in French.”
Sentient people know that Kerry wasn’t calling for an encounter session with Mullah Omar. But, nonetheless, I’m sure that there are many stupid people who believe that the word sensitive translates into sissy. Waddaya gonna do? I don’t condemn Tumulty for relaying the GOP operative’s quote. It’s real and it is one of their talking points. However, most people do not know that the quote is taken out of context and readers would have benefitted from knowing that. Perhaps an editor trimmed it for space. Fine. Shitty journalism, but no surprise.
Here’s where she really goes in the tank. She follows with her own words “a statement that couln’t have been more dainty if he had uttered it in French.” Those exact words could have been written by Tom DeLay. She has just issued a copyrighted GOP bumper sticker in her own voice.
Although it would come as a hell of a surprise to Napoleon, Voltaire and Balzac, the french language is now synonymous with “dainty” and to be “French” now means coward in Republican circles. The press finds this simply hilarious. But, lets not kid ourselves. The “french” appellation is merely a new word for “faggot” and everybody knows it. And that’s exactly what Karl Rove wants people to think about John Kerry. In fact, they are planning their convention around this theme.
There is no amount of political correctness in the world that can stop bigots from creating insider code words to descibe the untermenschen they collectively loathe. And the modern Republicans have an especially sophomoric approach to this that seems to appeal mightily to the media. Maybe it’s the “band trip” quality of the campaign trail, but the press seems unable to resist adopting the snarky high school level barbs that the republicans are so good at dishing out. It’s all part of the right’s “derisive humor” technique, something that is completely obvious to anyone who is paying attention and which they readily admit to using. (See every Bob Sommerby post on the 2000 election.)
So, Karen Tumulty thinks the “french” thing is just adorable. She probably got a little case of the giggles when she wrote it and that’s just great for her. But, she is peddling GOP propaganda and everytime she and her snotty little cohorts do this they inject the body politic with toxic Republican bigotry.
Glory Days
Atrios has linked to a freeper thread (since pulled) in which the Borg collectively loses its mind and decides to take to the streets over the idea that somebody’s going to call in the UN to monitor elections.
I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. This is no accident. They are merely doing what they are programmed to do. It comes directly from none other than their favorite leprechaun of the un-dead, Newtie himself:
One GOP lawmaker told The Hill that Gingrich encouraged Republicans to pick issues such as school prayer, strengthening work requirements for welfare recipients and barring the United Nations from monitoring U.S. elections, which all polled at higher than an 80 percent rating.
“There’s a consensus developing among activists that new issues are emerging where [the polling] is decidedly with us,” the lawmaker said. “We can show a contrast.”
Gingrich spelled out his views at a meeting last week organized by House GOP Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), the fourth-ranking member of the GOP House leadership.
Lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s session expressed excitement about Gingrich’s policy proposals and political tactics.
Rep. Phil English, a Republican who represents Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s old district in northwestern Pennsylvania, said: “It is extremely useful in depicting Kerry’s position on the political spectrum to raise issues like welfare reform where he’s been on the far-left extreme.”
He added, “We have a very good wedge issue. … It’s worth asking why he is part of a rear-guard action blocking the permanency of welfare reform. Is he not out of touch with cultural issues of the rest of the country?”
I hear they are also thinking of creating a fresh, exciting ten point plan on these cultural wedge issues to put through in the first hundred days. They might call it “The Contract With America.” I think it’s a winner.
Pundit Deficiency
I’m sure we’ve all read this fascinating little piece on the “side-by-side” military records of prominent Republicans, Democrats and journalists, thanks to Atrios. One part is particularly telling, in a way the writer never intended:
Here is the list of journalists and pundits called “nonpartisan and right of center”:
David Brooks, NY Times columnist
William F. Buckley, National Review
Pat Buchanan, MSNBC commentator
Ann Coulter, writer & commentator
Lou Dobbs, CNN News anchor
Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal editor
Sean Hannity, Hannity & Colmes host
Brit Hume, Fox News anchor
Rush Limbaugh, Radio talk show host
Bill O’Reilly, O’Reilly Factor host
Michael Savage, Radio talk show host
William Safire, NY Times columnist
George Will, Washington Post columnist
Who of these are non-partisan, I wonder? Being generous, I’ll say that Hume and Dobbs work to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. The rest are all openly partisan and eight of them (out of thirteen) are rabid, red meat Republicans.
If you were to ask informed Republicans if they trusted the straight journalists listed above and if they generally agreed with the others’ views, they would probably say yes. If there would be a problem it would be because a few moderate Republicans might not feel comfortable identifying themselves with the extreme rhetoric of the Limbaughs, Coulters and Savages. In other words, the worst any Republican would say about this list is that many of the people on it are too extreme, not that they are too partisan. And most would say these people fairly represent their views.
Now look at the list of journalists and pundits called nonpartisan and left of center:
Wolf Bilzter, CNN News anchor
Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchor
Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes host
Al Franken, Political satirist
Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist
Jim Lehrer, PBS News Hour anchor
Bill Maher, HBO, political satirist
Chris Matthews, Hardball host
Michael Moore, Political satirist, filmmaker
Dan Rather, CBS News Anchor
Tim Russert, Meet the Press host
Jon Stewart, Daily Show host
George Stephanopoulos, ABC This Week host
Out of these only Colmes, Franken, Maher, Moore and Stewart, five out of thirteen, can be called rabid left wing Democrats and that is a serious stretch with all but the ineffectual Colmes and Franken. Of these, only Colmes has made his career as a liberal talking head. These others are free agents who’ve signed on for the season.
Matthews, Russert and Stephanopoulos have past ties to Democrats, but work hard to prove their “objective” credibility, mostly by being harder on Democrats than Republicans. This is the exact opposite of the Republican pundits (like Scarborough and Buchanan) who maintain their partisan ties quite openly. However, being much, much too generous I’ll put them in the category with Brooks, Safire and Will above because we can never convince a Republican that they are non-partisans no matter how many Democrats they run out of town on a rail to prove otherwise.
Friedman is a bi-partisan wonk type who is only on the list because he writes about foreign policy. He could have gone on either list.
But, Blitzer, Brokaw, Lehrer, and Rather are non-partisan journalists of the type completely missing from the “right of center” list above. They do not, by job description, offer their opinions, as both Hume and Dobbs often do on their programs and certainly not in the way Matthews, Russert, Buchanan, Gigot, Will and Buckley do.
Informed Democrats look at this list and see five entertainers who speak the truth, three pundits trying very hard to get Republicans to see them as objective and five buckets of lukewarm spit who are easily played by the right wing. Unlike the Republicans whose only complaint (among a minority of voters) would be that the list is too right wing, the problem for us is that most of the left of center list isn’t left at all.
This list clearly shows the huge deficit we face in the punditocrisy. They have a full employment act for full time partisan screamers, talking heads and screeching pens. We have to depend on Alan Colmes, Jim Lehrer and Wolf Blitzer.
Little Known Fact
For assholes like the Fox Allstars who claim that Kerry only spent four months in Vietnam and that makes him a pussy, it should be known that while it is true he only spent four months getting shot at and saving lives and winning medals for bravery in swift boats — he had previously done a full tour onboard the USS Gridley stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. Swift boat duty was his second tour.
Never post and run. Typos corrected.
Dear Jodi,
Nice work. You are such a dear. You make my job easy.
Love,
Karl
P.S. I’m especially grateful that you didn’t mention that we’re using the “lost years in the Senate” as a major talking point in the campaign. Your article made our coordinated campaign rap on Kerry’s accomplishments sound downright reasonable. And the long part at the end where you framed “Vietnam” and “son of a millworker” as running away from their records instead of positive character shorthand was just perfect.
Thanks again.
Bet you feel right at home.
Tautology For Dummies
Via Brad DeLong: ”
Q Good morning. My name is Mark Trahant. I’m the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Native American Journalist Association. (Applause.) Most school kids learn about the government in the context of city, county, state and federal. And, of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you’ve been a governor and a President, so you have a unique experience, looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?
THE PRESIDENT: Tribal sovereignty means that, it’s sovereign. You’re a — you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.
help us.
So Much For Humint
Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder-Experts
The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its “orange alert” this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.
[…]
“The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse,” said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane’s Defense publications. “You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it’s so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
“It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It’s not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it’s on the front pages every time there’s a development, is it?”
A source such as Khan — cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents — would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.
“Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover.”
Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan’s name to become public was “very unclever.”
“If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future” if Khan’s identity had been protected, he said.
Britain, which has dealt with Irish bombing campaigns for decades, has a policy of announcing security alerts only under narrow circumstances, when authorities have specific advice they can give the public to take action that will make them safer.
Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain’s anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was “a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately.”
Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said an inherent risk in public alerts is that secret sources will be compromised.
“When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations,” he said.
This alert was such obvious bullshit. Laura Bush going to sit amongst the targets on Monday is really all you need to know. Scaring the hell out of everybody is bad enough. But, now it turns out they blew a chance to infiltrate an actual al Qaeda cell and figure out what current plots might be going on.
I do have to take issue with one comment that Kevin Drum made in this post. I don’t think there’s any excuse for this, least of all that the critics of the administration “panicked” them into making a mistake. This is national security during a hotly contested presidential race. It’s part of the job description. If Bill Clinton could deal with the “wag the dog” nonsense while he was being impeached, I think these guys should be able to keep their fucking mouths shut when Howard Dean gives them a hard time on CNN. They are supposed to be able to handle the pressure. If they can’t, that’s a big problem that has nothing to do with the critics and everything to do with them.
Update: If this is true, then this was a major blunder:
A Pakistani man whose arrest led the authorities to uncover the terrorist reconnaissance of financial institutions in the United States was also communicating with people believed to be behind a potential plot to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said on Saturday.
The arrest last month of the man, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, has prompted an investigation in the United States, Britain and other countries to locate those behind the surveillance operations. Now the authorities say they believe his arrest is helping unravel the earlier threat to carry out an attack this year inside the United States.
[…]
Still frustrating investigators is the uncertainty about whether the surveillance in 2000 and 2001 was part of ongoing plot. So far, the officials said, no clear evidence has been obtained that indicates whether the plot was ever abandoned.
Increasingly however, the authorities suspect that the Qaeda figures known to be involved in the surveillance were active members of the terrorist network and operated in a clandestine manner suggesting that they wanted to carry out attacks inside the United States.
Investigators are counting on people already in custody, or others whom they hope to apprehend, to help solve the mystery of whether the plot is still active.
It might have been nice to keep Khan working as a mole for a while so they could catch the guys who were planning more terrorist attacks, don’t you think?
Why, you’d almost think they didn’t want to stop terorist attacks from disrupting the election.
Gitmo Horror Part II
Last week I wrote about the first person accounts of torture and other inhumane treatment in Guantanamo contained in a report(pdf) by the Center for Constitutional Rights. More information is coming to light and it squares with what the three freed British citizens said.
First, it’s quite clear that prisoners are routinely beaten and abused when captured in Afghanistan. Often these prisoners have been sold by various tribes and factions (reportedly for $5,000) to US forces. From that point on, these prisoners are considered terrorists with no human rights. The prisoners who are then sent to Guantanamo are subjected to harsh mental torture, much of it specifically tailored to each prisoner by way of psychiatric medical evaluations. There is evidence that this mental torture results in more false confessions than any useable intelligence. In fact, some people allege that there has been next to no useable intelligence drawn from the prisoners in Gitmo. Instead, according to the three Britons, it seems to have become something of a training camp for new interrogators who use the prisoners there to practice their craft. An article called “Guantanamo Bay on Trial” in the January edition of Vanity Fair (no link) bears these claims out.
“…from a military standpoint, intelligence officials with extensive experience in counterterrorism claim that Gitmo’s intelligence value is relatively low, and much of the information obtained there unreliable. Vanity Fair has established that none of the al-Qaeda leaders captured since September 11, 2001, has ever been held at GuantAnamo Bay. Sixty-four detainees innocent of any terrorist connection have already been released, and officials admit there may be many more to come. The method of interrogation now in use at Gitmo-a formal system of escalating bribes in return for confessions-is almost certain to produce bogus testimony, experts say, and the camp’s interrogators are mostly young and inexperienced.
[…]
General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his “joint interrogation group” are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. “They’re all young people, but they’re really committed to winning the mission,” Miller says. “Intelligence is a young person’s game-you’ve got to be flexible.”
Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. “Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys,” says one. “I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months.” Another had met some of Miller’s interrogators. “They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there,” he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general “they just didn’t feel that the process was going anywhere fast.
This article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer reveals the details of yet another prisoner’s experience in Guantanamo from papers recently unsealed by a Seattle Federal Court:
Recently declassified documents in a Seattle federal court describe the extreme isolation of an alleged al-Qaida member at a U.S. military prison that experts say constitutes torture and war crimes.
The documents, unsealed yesterday at the request of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others, include U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift’s firsthand observation at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison of the conditions of solitary confinement of his client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year-old Yemeni who acknowledges chauffeuring Osama bin Laden at his Afghan farm.
The court documents describing the alleged mistreatment of Hamdan are part of a lawsuit challenging his detention, the conditions of detention and his prolonged isolation in solitary confinement.
[…]
In 2001, as U.S. forces were fighting in Afghanistan, Hamdan says Afghan fighters captured him, hogtied him with electrical wire and sold him to American forces for $5,000. Once in U.S. custody, Hamdan maintains that American officials in Afghanistan:
Beat him with fists and feet.
Forced him to sit motionless on benches for days.
Dressed him only in overalls in subfreezing temperatures.
Showed him a gun and threaten him with death, torture and imprisonment.
After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo. There, his life got worse.
Hamdan told Lt. Cmdr. Swift that the eight months of solitary confinement at Guantanamo “was worse than anything he had experienced in Afghanistan … and that he was going crazy.”
“I have not been permitted to see the sun or hear other people outside …. or talk with other people. I am alone except for a guard,” Hamdan said last February in a court affidavit that was first sealed, then made classified in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
“One month is like a year here, and I have considered pleading guilty in order to get out of here,” Hamdan said after two months in solitary.
Now — six months later — even the guard is gone. A video camera mounted on a wall now monitors Hamdan, according to Swift’s statement.
Experts on torture and international law said yesterday that — if true — the death threats and solitary confinement described in court documents constitute war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. They say the allegations also represent violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture as well as U.S. law.
And several international legal scholars said that criminal responsibility is not limited to those who committed the torture and can implicate the entire chain of command up to the president of the United States if they knew or should have known about the violations.
The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicidee another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:
In the camp’s acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. “He’s refused to eat 148 consecutive meals,” says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. “In my opinion, he’s a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn’t get his way.” Why is he shackled? “I don’t want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt,” he says.
By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: “manipulative self-injurious behavior,” or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means “the individual’s state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life.” Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.
Daryl Matthews, professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, was asked by the Pentagon to spend a week at GuantAnamo investigating detainees’ mental health and the treatments available. Unlike reporters-who must agree in writing not to speak to prisoners-Professor Matthews spoke with the inmates for many hours.
Manipulative self-injurious behavior “is not a psychiatric classification,” he says, and the Pentagon should not be using it. “It is dangerous to try to divide ‘serious’ attempts at suicide from mere gestures, and a psychiatrist needs to make a proper diagnosis in each and every case.” At Gitmo, Dr. Matthews says, the “huge cultural gulf” between camp staff and prisoners makes this difficult, if not impossible.
There is a lot of evidence in the three Briton’s testimony that this is a huge problem. Being English, they were much more able to deal with guards and interrogators and yet they were driven to a false confessions. But,in addition to the torture, there is a huge shortage of adequate translators and many different languages being spoken (Apparently, there has even been a contingent of Chinese from the northern border who were handed over to the Chinese government, their fate unknown. One can only imagine.) Many of these guys are living an isolated, Kafkaesque nightmare.
Here’s the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists “off the streets,” until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special “military commission” tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, “with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy.”
We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don’t know how many more are still inside.
In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interogations, not just because they aren’t actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they’ve been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.
In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.
I don’t know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it’s fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear “tough” on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.