Digby has a must-read post on immigration at firedoglake.
Hello? Karl?
New evidence of the utter moral bankruptcy of the Bush Administration is coming along to light so fast it’s hard to keep up. This morning’s clue comes to us from Larry Margasak of the Associated Press:
Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.
The phone jamming scandal goes back to the 2002 midterms, when Tobin’s operation used repeated hang-up calls to jam phones at a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote center. Tobin was working on behalf of then-Rep. John Sununu Jr., who won a narrow victory over Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for a U.S. Senate seat. A week before the election the race had been too close to call.
The prosecutors in Tobin’s case did not make the White House calls part of their case, although the phone records were an exhibit. “The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved,” writes Margasak. Apparently the Bush Justice Department prosecuted the case as narrowly as it could. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee spent millions on Tobin’s defense.
Besides the conviction of Tobin, the Republicans’ New England regional director, prosecutors negotiated two plea bargains: one with a New Hampshire Republican Party official and another with the owner of a telemarketing firm involved in the scheme. The owner of the subcontractor firm whose employees made the hang-up calls is under indictment.
The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004.
The case is back in the news because the Dems are bringing a civil suit alleging vote fraud (ya think?). Republicans say there are always lots of calls flying around between Republicans on election day.
A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls — mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office — between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting.
There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.
Josh Marshall suggests there is “a nexus between the phone-jamming case and the Abramoff scandal,” although it’s not clear to me where the connections are. But check out the TPM “Grand Ole Docket” page.
Update: Why I quit using Google AdSense — The Peking Duck also has a story about Tobin and Phonegate today, but check out the ad in the screen-captured Google adstrip:
Too funny.
The New Iron Curtain
I remember back in the late 1950s when I was a little hillbilly child and the old folks wuz watchin’ civil rights marches on the TV, an’ they’d look at each other real scared like, an’ say that Martin Luther King is gonna show up here some day. And then they’d all turn whiter than they already were.
Somehow, the reaction on the Right Blogosphere to the immigration marches reminded me of that. Michelle Malkin must’ve changed her pants a dozen times today.
See, what’s got them really scared is that Democrats are talking to the marchers. Dems are even recruiting voters from among the marchers. Michelle is hollering about voter fraud, because, you know, the only people who join those marches are illegal aliens.
When Anna Salazar was first dating her husband, Roberto, it didn’t occur to her to ask his immigration status.
By the time the California native learned Roberto was an illegal immigrant, it didn’t make a difference: She had met the love of her life. Now — five years, a Valentine’s Day wedding and two baby boys later — they are facing Roberto’s deportation to Mexico and a possible 10-year exile from the country where he has lived since he was 8. …
… Sensenbrenner’s bill would build 700 miles of fencing along the border and have Anna Salazar, too, charged with an aggravated felony — “harboring” her undocumented husband. She could face more than a year in prison, loss of her children to foster care during that time and forfeiture of her assets. [link]
Oh, wait …
Righties can’t wrap their heads about the fact that huge numbers of native born Americans are personally connected to “illegals.” Dr. Atrios has photographs of the immigration rally in Philadelphia that brings this point home. Families are terrified they are going to be torn apart. Citizens of the United States are begging their government not to deport their parents or grandparents, or wives, or husbands, or siblings.
What does “liberty” mean if you aren’t free to be with the people you love?
From Wizbang:
The fact that the Dems are recruiting at these protests isn’t a surprise. It fits into their big picture of race and politics (which is why the flyer’s visual puts Texas and Mexico together [Note: the protest under discussion was in Texas — maha]). The Democrats classify people based upon race and then work to corner the racial voting collectives.
I’ve yet to understand how the Dems manage to corner a “voting collective” without putting microchips in people’s heads. But Republicans, as you know, never use racially targeted campaigns to win votes. They didn’t do it here, either.
I haven’t written much about immigration because I haven’t seen any proposals that I’m entirely comfortable with. “Guest worker” programs were a disaster for Europe, which makes me wonder why we’re even talking about them. Certainly we have to gain control of our borders, for our own security. And Paul Krugman wrote in his March 27 column —
…many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren’t for Mexican immigration.
That’s why it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do ”jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.
But there are undocumented workers already here, and undocumented workers are underpaid and exploited workers. I hate the fact that “The System” turns a blind eye to some portion of illegals because, you know, we need those people to pick fruit and watch the kids. I hate the fact that the burden of law falls heavier on the workers than on the employers who exploit them. And breaking up families is unspeakably cruel.
My solution would involve slowing the flow of immigration by prosecuting and severely punishing employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers to avoid complying with wage and hour laws. But for people already here, especially people who have been here for years and who have loved ones — friends and family — who are citizens, it should be possible for them to stop hiding and to fully integrate with this nation, of which they are already a part. If that’s amnesty, then I guess I’m for amnesty.
Gebe Martinez of the Houston Chronicle reports that some Republicans are uneasy with their party’s “get tough” approach.
When the U.S. House passed a bill in December making it a felony to be in the country illegally, the ”get-tough” message became the flash point that has drawn millions of protestors into the streets.
With the Senate failing last week to finish a bill that would have rejected some of the harshest language in the House version, Republicans are expressing regret that the punitive House measure stands as the most recent congressional action on immigration.
I ‘spect there are a few who will regret it even more in November.
A Short History of the Iraq Occupation
John Simpson, BBC, Via Avedon:
Just over three years ago, when I interviewed the Saudi foreign minister, I asked him why he thought the US was determined to invade Iraq.
He said he had put the same question to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Mr Cheney had replied: “Because it’s do-able.”
Read it all.
War on Christians
What would Jesus do? Not this, certainly.
Yes, He Would
Via True Blue Liberal you can read today’s Paul Krugman column without breaking through the NY Times firewall. Here are two terrible truths Bush supporters cannot face, never mind refute:
First, it’s clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion between Mr. Bush and Tony Blair. In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.
Second, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war — a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds — rested on suspect evidence. For example, in the 2003 State of the Union address Mr. Bush cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas of the National Journal reports that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.
These two truths have been verified way beyond a shadow of a doubt, yet righties cannot address them honestly. Instead, when challenged, they concoct a straw man and argue with that. For example, Gateway Pundit’s defense of the newest leak revelation is titled “Media Appalled that George Bush Dare Defend Himself.” And, of course, no one is appalled that Bush would defend himself. We’re appalled that he keeps lying his ass off to do it.
But Krugman’s main point is that no one should doubt Bush could invade Iran.
“But he wouldn’t do that,†say people who think they’re being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn’t sensible. It’s wishful thinking. …
… Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.
And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.
See also John Steinberg of Raw Story —
In a rational world, Bush’s dismal track record (by our standards) would hasten the handing of the car keys to a designated driver. In the strange world that Bush and Karl Rove inhabit, it means that a bigger distraction must be created.
Now, I don’t think the public would back an invasion of Iran unless a new, major terrorist strike could be blamed on Iran, or if, as Steinberg suggests, a couple of American warships happened to sink in the Persian Gulf. That might do it.
William M. Arkin of the Washington Post writes in “Goldilocks and Iran” that there are three ways Iran and the U.S. could enter into a war:
We could go to war if a cornered Iran lashes out. We could go to war if the intelligence community assesses that Iran has clandestinely acquired nuclear weapons and an administration decides that the U.S. must preempt. We could go to war if intensified military activity on both sides leads to greater possibilities for contact leading to an accident or incident that escalates out of control.
None of those sound all that farfetched to me.
Fred Kaplan at Slate talks about a “Global Game of Chicken“:
They’ve been revving the engines and rattling the sabers loud and hard lately. In the past few weeks, President Bush has released a document on national-security strategy that declares Iran to be the single biggest threat on the planet. Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that Iran will face serious consequences if it continues to enrich uranium. Joseph Cirincione, a sober-minded nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in the new issue of Foreign Policy:
For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.
BTW, the Cirincione article quoted above is titled “Fool Me Twice” and is a good read.
At a series of seminars at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, analysts and ex-officials debated the pros and cons of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but they agreed that keeping the conflict to a snappy “limited strike” was unlikely; it would almost certainly escalate to all-out war, with regional and possibly global repercussions.
Yes, that’s certainly not comforting.
In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows discusses a “war game” sponsored by the Atlantic in 2004.
… under the guidance of Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who had conducted many real-world war games for the Pentagon, including those that shaped U.S. strategy for the first Gulf War, we assembled a panel of experts to ask “What then?†about the ways in which the United States might threaten, pressure, or entice the Iranians not to build a bomb. Some had been for and some against the invasion of Iraq; all had served in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or other parts of the nation’s security apparatus, and many had dealt directly with Iran.
The experts disagreed on some details but were nearly unanimous on one crucial point: what might seem America’s ace in the hole—the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations in a pre-emptive air strike—was a fantasy.
Fallows elaborates and explains the reasons why this is a fantasy, which I will not list here. Bottom line, the panel agreed that Iran’s getting nuclear weapons capability would be a very bad thing. But trying to solve this problem by dropping bombs on it would fail militarily (for reasons given in the article) and would also cause other more serious problems. Like Iraq, only worse.
If you are doom and gloomed out now, Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian looks at the bright side. Unfortunately, it’s only the bright side for Brits.
Britain is unlikely to participate in the nuclear bombing of Iranian atomic weapons research facilities. Instead, our role in any forthcoming nuclear blitz will be to fill the blogosphere with sarcastic posts and make tut-tutting noises. The latter may or may not be heard above B61-11s slamming nukes into Iran’s Natanz centrifuge plant, which is challengingly located 75ft below ground.
(The lousy exchange rate makes Britain damn expensive, but maybe my Welsh relatives will take me in for a while. …)
Cross-posted at The American Street.)
Update: See also “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.”
How We Liberated Iraq!
Nancy A. Youssef writes for Knight Ridder about the gratitude of liberated Iraqis:
In the middle of methodically recalling the day his brother’s family was killed, Yaseen’s monotone voice and stream of tears suddenly stopped. He looked up, paused and pleaded: “Please don’t let me say anything that will get me killed by the Americans. My family can’t handle any more.”
Oh, wait …
The story of what happened to Yaseen and his brother Younes’ family has redefined Haditha’s relationship with the Marines who patrol it. On Nov. 19, a roadside bomb struck a Humvee on Haditha’s main road, killing one Marine and injuring two others.
The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.
The Marines initially reported that 15 people died in the explosion and that 8 insurgents were killed in subsequent combat. The Navy began an investigation only because a Time magazine reporter spoke up. On Friday three officers of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment were relieved of duty, but the Navy won’t admit this was because of the incident at Haditha.
The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.
She fainted after the Marines burst through the door and began firing. When she regained consciousness, only her 3-year-old brother was still alive, but bleeding heavily. She comforted him in a room filled with dead family members until he died, too. And then she went to her Uncle Yaseen’s house next door.
Neither Yaseen nor Safa have returned home since.
Haditha is an insurgent stronghold, and the Marines there frequently come under attack. It’s not hard to imagine the Marines were stressed beyond comprehension and acted in the conviction they were shooting at insurgents. The real criminals are the politicians in Washington whose incompetence and hubris put those Marines in Haditha, IMO.
Indeed, many in this town, whose residents are stuck in the battle between extremists and the Americans, said now it is the U.S. military they fear most.
“The mujahadeen (holy warriors) will kill you if you stand against them or say anything against them. And the Americans will kill you if the mujahadeen attack them several kilometers away,” said Mohammed al-Hadithi, 32, a barber who lives in neighboring Haqlania. With a cigarette between his fingers, he pointed at a Marine patrol as it passed in front of his shop. “I look at each of them, and I see killers.”
Generations of Iraqis will hate us, I suspect.
Over at Thomas Paine’s Corner, Jason Miller writes about “America’s ‘Noble’ Cause“:
“Why are we over there in Iraq?â€
“To protect our freedoms.â€
“How are the Iraqis threatening our freedoms?â€
“They attacked us on 9/11.â€
“If that is true, why are so many Americans against the war?â€
“I don’t know, but I think Cindy Sheehan and all the other war protesters should be rounded up and shot.â€
Sounds familiar, huh? And, of course, the only reason anyone would be opposed to the Iraq War is hatred of President Bush.
Miller’s article — a diatribe against the American Empire — seems a tad harsh even to me, but there’s little in it I can argue with. One of his points is that “Americans” (I wish he would distinguish Bush supporters from the rest of us) believe that the U.S. has an inalienable right “to murder an unlimited number of innocent civilians so long as our military machine does the killing and we label the victims as ‘collateral damage.'”
I ‘spect if any rightie bloggers comment on Nancy A. Youssef’s article today, it will be to claim that Yaseen’s family must have deserved to be shot. And if not they should still thank us. We’re bringing them freedom, after all.
Sorta related: “Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate“; “Democracy in the Arab World, a U.S. Goal, Falters“
No Excuse Left Behind
I realize we’ve got sexier issues to think about today — lies, corruption, global thermonuclear war — but I’d like to take a moment to reflect on No Child Left Behind. If education issues aren’t your bag, feel free to skip the details between asterisks (***) and go right to the conclusions.
When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he talked a lot about education. He promised to be The Education President. This was an odd issue for a Republican to run on, considering the Reagan/libertarian wing of the party long had wanted to eliminate the Department of Education and leave public schooling entirely to the states. But, conventional wisdom said, talking about education made Bush more palatable to suburbanite soccer moms. It was a big part of his “compassionate conservative” shtick.
In 2000, and again in 2004, the Bush campaign touted education reform as among Bush’s biggest achievements as governor of Texas. His ads claimed “dramatic results” in Texas education. In fact, CBS reported in 2003 that much of this “success” came from cooking the books — reporting false dropout rates and test scores. But that didn’t stop Bush from continuing to brag.
The centerpiece of President Bush’s education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, was signed into law about four years ago. Bush is proud of this act. He mentioned it frequently during the 2004 campaign. The Department of Education building in Washington DC — I don’t know what they do in there, but it’s one big mother of a building — is festooned with NCLB banners, and the entrances are decorated with cheery “little red schoolhouse” facades. The building serves as a billboard promoting NCLB.
Sydney H. Schanberg provides a thumbnail explanation of NCLB in this Village Voice article from 2003:
The president’s No Child Left Behind law requires every public school system to administer rigorous annual testing of students, starting in the third grade, in such subjects as English and math. If the test scores of any segment of a school’s population — such as Latinos struggling with English or disabled students in special-ed classes — do not meet the proficiency levels set by the law, the entire school is listed as “failing” and students can choose to transfer to a school in the district that is doing well. In other words, averaging the test scores of the entire student body might produce a successful result, but the scores of the struggling segment will still, under the law, brand the school as “failing.” In addition to placing new financial and space demands on successful schools, the law’s requirements will also lay serious new money burdens on the ones with troubles, for such things as additional teacher training and additional classes.
In February 2004, Rep. George Miller, Senior Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, released this statement:
The Bush budget continues to renege on the commitment to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act. This year the Bush Budget underfunds the No Child Left Behind Act by $9.4 billion. As part of this shortfall, the Bush budget underfunds the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program by $1 billion, eliminating afterschool programs for over 1.3 million children. The Title I program is underfunded by $7.2 billion. The Bush Budget leaves nearly five million disadvantaged children without extra academic help and services. Cumulatively, President Bush and the Republican Congress have underfunded NCLB by $27 billion since its enactment.
Naturally, during the 2004 campaign, whenever a Democrat complained that NCLB was underfunded, the Bush campaign accused that individual of being against education.
But an op-ed in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Elaine Garan says there are, um, more problems.
In the past year alone, the revolt has included suits filed by the state of Connecticut and the National Education Association, as well as state legislation in Utah, Virginia and other states seeking to trump the federal law.
Dissatisfaction covers a wide range of issues, from complaints that it is underfunded to allegations that it is unconstitutional. There are objections to the inequities of standardized testing and its restrictions on the curriculum, and to the unfair penalization of teachers and schools for factors outside their control. There also have been serious questions about flaws in the scientific research determining the programs schools can use, as well as alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the awarding of grants for the law’s Reading First initiative.
Naturally, Bush Administration officials have not been working with states and educators to see how the Act could be improved. That is not the Bush style. The Bush style is to use a combination of bullying and bullshitting to keep naysayers in line and prop up allegiance to the holy NCLB exactly as it is. “The Bush administration has expended enormous time and energy scrambling to put out brush fires of resistance and keep angry states and districts under control” writes Garan.
And then came Katrina.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings initially expressed unwillingness to grant waivers to schools affected by Katrina. For weeks, schools waited in limbo until she reluctantly agreed to allow automatic one-year waivers from accountability standards — but only for those Gulf Coast schools that were destroyed or severely damaged. In effect, the secretary’s compassionate flexibility amounted to this: Schools that no longer exist and have no students to teach, much less test, will not be punished [for] failure to meet their “adequate yearly progress” targets.
Further, schools that have taken in the traumatized student refugees of Katrina will not receive automatic exemptions from federal punishment if they miss their standards.
(Can somebody explain the point of this? If not to destroy public schools? That’s the only plausible explanation.)
A news google of “No Child Left Behind” showed other interesting consequences. Thanks to the budget demands of NCLB, schools are cutting Gifted and Talented programs. Teacher certification requirements are causing hardships for rural schools. Because NCLB emphasizes math and reading standardized test scores, educators complain they are being forced to shortchange science, history, and other subjects to make time to “teach to the test.” (More here.)
More than a quarter of the nation’s schools failed to meet standards this year, says the Department of Education. But here’s another kicker — the Act requires schools to bring students up to a certain level of proficiency, but leaves to the states to decide what that “proficiency” is. Therefore, the Act rewards states with lower standards and punishes states with higher standards. Several states are considering lowering standards so as not to incur the draconian NCLB punishments for failure.
In spite of all this, the Bush Administration is proud of NCLB and proclaims it is “working.”
Conclusion: The NCLB is a big, expensive mess, yet it remains one of the Administration’s finest domestic policy achievements. How can that be?
From the Administration’s perspective, what’s not to like? NCLB is a wonderful program. The title of the Act is both catchy and warm/fuzzy at the same time. It provides an excuse for the President to get his picture taken with children (more warm/fuzzy). And even though in the long run it is unlikely to result in better educated children, I’m sure eventually some numbers will be creatively crunched, or cooked, to make it look as if something is being achieved, which to the Bushies is all that really matters.
The only flaw that I can see is that NCLB hasn’t resulted in any big defense industry contracts, but give ’em time.
And through it all we see the Bushie modus operandi — create a stupid program; refuse to work with anyone outside the bubble to improve the program; instead, campaign relentlessly to punish anyone who badmouths the program; and even if it fails, declare the program a great success and exploit for its PR value.
Now, given that in more than five years the Bush Administration has failed to achieve anything substantive — this includes job and economic growth — don’t forget the debt — why does anyone still support this clown?
There is no rational answer to that question. Clearly, people who still support Bush do so because they want to. He represents something to them that they desire, desperately. And they’ve invested too much of their egos into supporting him to let go without serious existential angst. So they continue to make one excuse after another for the ongoing catastrophe that is the Bush Administration.
A die-hard Bushie cannot be reasoned with. However, Bush’s falling poll numbers tell us there are more reachable people out there than I used to think possible. Truly, a couple of years ago I figured the absolute basement of Bush support would settle out at no lower than 40 percent, but we’ve pushed it lower than that.
The day may come we can leave Bush and his minions behind. Let’s hope.
Interesting Times
You know you’re living in interesting times when news that the United States is seriously considering use of nuclear weapons against another country is not the top story.
In fact, the most linked-to article in the Blogosphere today seems to be this one, by Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post. Highlights:
As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a “concerted action” by “multiple people in the White House” — using classified information — to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” a critic of President Bush’s war in Iraq. …
… One striking feature of that decision — unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it — is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.
Regarding the “sixteen words“:
United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair’s role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that “certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”
It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney’s direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure uranium” in Africa.
This isn’t news to most of us who hang out in the Left Blogosphere, of course, but it’s nice to see the evil MSM finally catching on after, what, three years?
The Right and its allies are trying to bury the central issue of this case under truckloads of verbiage — e.g., the President didn’t do anything illegal; the President didn’t specifically direct Libby to “out” Valerie Plame; the Sixteen Words were not technically a lie, etc. The Washington Post itself is running an editorial today claiming the NIE leak was “good.” “President Bush was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons,” it says. [UPDATE: See SusanG]
But that is not why the NIE was declassified. Bush didn’t go to war because the NIE told him Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons, because that same NIE said the “intelligence” in back of that claim was suspect. As Gellman and Linzer write, the “evidence” that was leaked had already been disproved months before.
It is obvious that the leaking was not about making anything clear, but about spreading disinformation for political purposes. It was, in fact, about making things muddy.
But as another indication of how interesting our times have become, the central issue is no longer about Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson. As Ron Chusid writes in the Democratic Daily Blog, the goal of the Bush Administration leakers was to discredit anyone who criticized Bush. It was not about explaining the President’s reasons for invading Iraq; it was not about setting records straight; it was not about preventing Matt Cooper from publishing inaccurate information; it was about shutting down legitimate criticism of Administration policies. Trashing Valerie Plame’s career and exposing ongoing intelligence operations were just collateral damage.
And, ultimately, it was about deceiving the American people.
Joe Wilson was on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos this morning, and Wilson said that if President Bush wants to salvage his reputation there are two things he should do. First, he and Cheney should release the transcripts of their interviews with Patrick Fitzgerald about Plame. Second, since recent court filings have revealed that “multiple people” in the White House took part in the Wilson-Plame smear campaign, Bush should find out who those “multiple people” are and fire them.
It won’t happen, of course, and I’m sure Wilson knows that.
See also: Larry Johnson, “George W. Bush, Rogue President” and “George Bush, A Slam Dunk Liar“; Murray Waas, “What Bush Was Told About Iraq.”
Update: Michael Smith, London Times, “‘Forgers’ of key Iraq war contract named“
Brave New El Salvadore
I’ve written before about abortion in Latin America. I’ve written about how abortion rates in Latin America are higher than rates in the U.S. in spite of the fact that abortion is illegal in most of Latin America. I’ve written about the approximately 5,000 Latinas who die every year from botched illegal abortion.
In this Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Jack Hitt focuses on one Latin American nation, El Salvador, which eight years ago criminalized all abortions. All of them, for any reason. Women can get a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison for getting an abortion. [Update: See correction to the Hitt article here.]
Physicians are under pressure to report any women who might have aborted to the proper authorities, on pain of prosecution —
“Many doctors are afraid not to report,” says Mira, the obstetrician I spoke to. This fear is heightened for doctors, she explains, by the fact that nurses also have a legal duty to report abortion crimes but are often confused about their obligation of confidentiality. So doctors are afraid that the nurses will report them for not reporting. “The entire system is run on fear,” Mira said.
The criteria for deciding whether a woman aborted sound like something out of The Crucible.
If the woman is “confused in her narrative,” Vargas said, that could well indicate that she’d had an abortion.
Vargas offered me an example. “Last year, in March, we received a 15-year-old who came referred from a hospital in an outer area,” she said. “She had a confused patient history. She had already been operated on and had a hysterectomy and had her ovaries taken out. She was in a delicate state, on respiratory assistance in intensive care. The doctors there said they had seen a perforation in the space beneath the cervix.
“This was around Eastertime last year, and the prosecutor’s offices were closed,” Vargas said. She had not seen any of the evidence herself, she said, but saw that the other doctors “had tried to call the prosecutor’s office, but it was closed. I came in, and on the chart what was pending was to call the police. So I called them.”
Courts can order vaginal inspections of women under suspicion. If a woman needs a hysterectomy after a suspected back-alley abortion, the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute for examination. If the case goes to trial, the organ may be used as evidence against the woman.
El Salvadore’s laws are so insane physicians cannot even terminate an ectopic pregnancy before it becomes critical —
Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.
According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. “That is our policy,” Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. “That is the law,” she said. “The D.A.’s office told us that this was the law.” Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital’s practice. “Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital,” she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. “If it’s dead, we can operate,” she said. “Before that, we can’t.” If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture. If they are able to persuade the patient to stay, though, doctors can operate the minute any signs of early rupturing are detected. Even a few drops of blood seeping from a fallopian tube will “irritate the abdominal wall and cause pain,” Valdés explained. By operating at the earliest signs of a potential rupture, she said, her doctors are able to minimize the risk to the woman.
Hitt interviewed one woman serving a 30-year sentence whose three children are growing up without her. He describes young women chained to hospital beds and guarded by police. Clandestine networks, something like the Underground Railroad, help poor girls travel to abortion providers in other countries.
The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, says “El Salvador is an inspiration,” an important victory for the “pro-life” movement.
Every now and then I run into a so-called “libertarian” who wants to criminalize abortion. You can talk to these lamebrains until you are purple, and they will not understand why criminalizing abortion limits the liberty and dignity of women.
Well, assholes, this is why.
Update: See also Scott Lemieux.