Month: May 2004

In his speech at the United States Army War College the other day, President Bush promised to “fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison,” then demolish Abu Ghraib, a symbol of oppression by both the regieme of Saddam Hussein and the American occupation.

Members of the Iraqi governing council, including the Interior Minister, and human rights groups, on the other hand, think that the plan to demolish Abu Ghraib misses the point, preferring an emphasis on ending the mistreatment of prisoners. The current head of the governing council, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, called the demolition idea a “waste of resources”, saying “Torture has taken place in every vault in Iraq”.

The American occupation is already too heavily associated with prisons. Do we really need to add another one to the legacy? Presumably, the new American-funded prison would ban unauthorized cameras or camcorders, but given the circumstances, it won’t take long for rumors of abuse to become associated with the new prison, regardless of whether anything’s actually happening or not. With Abu Ghraib, the American abuses are far overshadowed by the years of Saddam’s far more heinous acts. In a new prison, the only abuse echoing through the corridors will be the ones we perpetrated.

It was a bad day for the Oregonian Commentary page. In addition to the aforementioned Nielsen piece, they printed James Lileks’s Newhouse News Service editorial on the US Olympic Committee’s ban on flag-waving by athletes at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. It’s full of righteous vigor and indignation.

There’s just one problem.

The USOC says it never banned the practice.

The quotes Lileks uses appeared in a story in the Washington Times on May 15th which was attributed to a reporter for the London Sunday Telegraph. The USOC’s online statement refuting that article appeared on May 18th and was picked up by enough other news outlets that Google shows it for MSNBC, the Tucson Citizen, Channel 4 in Denver, the Kansas City Star, New York Newsday, the Palm Beach Post…oh, and an AP-hosted site.

Most of those outlets had the updated story by the 18th. The Oregonian probably did, too — I’m assuming it has an AP feed.

All it would have taken to validate (or not) this piece was for someone to type www.usoc.org in their Web browser. I know it’s an opinion piece, but would they print it if it was an opinion about how horrible it was that the sky was pink, without looking out the window first? Where’s their fact-checking? Newhouse and Lileks are no better; the opinion piece is dated May 19, a day after the USOC press release.

Wow.

Either David Reinhard’s ghost-writing the Oregonian‘s Susan Nielsen after her two-week hiatus from the op-ed pages, or she’s decided to become a sort of mini-Ann Coulter in the interim. Apparently, liberals not only hate Bush, freedom, the troops, the police, morals, and religion, but according to Nielsen we hate “fun” and America’s favorite pastime, too. It’s getting kind of hard to keep up.

Her argument’s difficult to follow, as most of these types of arguments usually are, but based on her read of “Portland’s most liberal circles”, baseball’s a no-go until all possible social services are paid for. Nobody from these circles is mentioned by name, so it’s hard to judge off-hand just how influential these liberals might be in city politics. It’s awe-inspiring to me that the supporters of the baseball plan could be stymied by super-liberals who are so elusive and powerful that Nielsen can’t even name them. Not even Neil Goldschmidt had that kind of clout.

The charge that “Portland liberals don’t do corporate” is fairly laughable as well. The supporters of the baseball plan are mentioned: Vera Katz, Oregon Chai, and Nike. These aren’t exactly people or companies I’ve seen conservatives clasping to their bosom. There are an awful lot of companies in this city whose founders and owners support liberal causes. Somebody’s buying coffee from those Starbuck’s shops on Hawthorne and ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s; there aren’t enough conservatives or middle-of-the-roaders to keep them going.

I’m all for corporations myself. As a contract programmer, I make some of my best money from corporations. But one thing I can’t do as a small business owner is perform a lot of work for someone I’m not absolutely sure can afford to pay me. For new customers and companies I’m unsure of, I require money up front and payments along the way. I’d go bankrupt if I took on a large project, did the work without payment, and a customer defaulted on me. Call it fiscally conservative. It may not be as “fun” as risking my house on some dot-com’s ability to pay me or plunking everything down on black at the roulette wheel, but that’s just me.

We (liberals and everyone else in the Portland area) have been told time and again that sports ventures are — to mix sports metaphors here — a slam dunk, yet there has been a continual landslide of money at PGE Park, followed recently by the bankruptcy of the Rose Garden Arena, despite the operating company being associated with Paul Allen, the owner of the primary users of the arena, the Portland Trailblazers. Apparently, somebody’s not paying someone else enough in rent.

A plan in which the baseball team’s owners or another entity guaranteed any public losses associated with siting a team in Portland would probably do just fine with everyone, whether they liked fun or not. If the stadium lost money, if the team lost money, so long as the public didn’t end up bailing somebody out yet again, that would be fun in and of itself!

It’s not as if just having a baseball team is an assurance of success — if it was, the Expos wouldn’t be moving. Maybe it’s because of those Canadian liberals.

U.N.-haters have been slobbering all over the likelihood that Saddam Hussein skimmed anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion off out of monies derived from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program over a period of several years.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asking for more money to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ostensibly, just $25 billion for now, but likely to add up to the total of $5 billion per month for the foreseeable future. The bulk of that money is regarded as “troop support”, but it’s not as if it’s going to be paid to the troops. Much of it will go to companies like Halliburton for supply functions, food services, and other operations that used to be handled (without a profit being taken) by the military themselves. Another chunk will go to replace and refurbish weapons and vehicles. It’d be interesting to see the balance sheets of those companies in the next fiscal year; Saddam might be envious.

In 2002, the per capita income in Iraq was estimated by the World Bank as somewhere between $750 and $900. As the cost of the Iraq war alone crosses the $100 billion mark, we’ve spent about $3,500 per Iraqi, between four and seven years’ income. Maybe we should have just skipped the invasion, the bombing, 700+ American dead and thousands of wounded (so far), tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and injured, and given them some money. At this rate, we’ll be following the Soviet Union down the same hole it dug for itself in Afghanistan.

In the Vietnam War, the U.S. faced a sovereign nation — North Vietnam — backed by both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Our adversary in that conflict had a capital, a country, and a government. The goal of the war was ostensibly to prevent the takeover of the South by the North.

That’s not the situation in Iraq. There’s no single enemy: what our forces face is a mélange of groups, each of which has its own agenda, all of which are opposed to the U.S. occupation. There’s no capital to bomb, as we bombed Hanoi. The largest external supporter of the opposition is Iran, which doesn’t have the status or resources of the Soviet Union or China in the ’60s. There’s no government opposing us. Insurgents aren’t sneaking through the DMZ or along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to get to where they’re launching attacks, they already live there.

A more correct comparison is Palestine. Apart from the fact that our Palestine is on the other side of the world and not next door, the situation in Iraq looks a lot more like the Occupied Territories than Indochina. Military force in the hands of a foreign power? Check. Impotent local governmental authority? Check. Thousands of detainees held without charge plus occasional torture? Check. Multiple militia groups executing attacks on occupiers and carving out some local civic control? Check. Occupier responses to attacks that have a tendency to kill civilians in the process? Check.

In the midst of the first week of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, civilian contractor Thomas Hammill managed to escape his captors 23 days after he’d been taken hostage.

Given the mutilation of the bodies of military contractors in Fallujah in early April and the killings of U.N. personnel, aid workers, and Iraqi civilians, I wouldn’t be at all surprised that many of the other hostages taken in past months have been physically abused. Certainly, any number of them have been found dead, including others taken at the same time as Mr. Hammill.

Hammill, on the other hand, although he and his hostage-takers were staying in a hovel infested with mosquitos, received some treatment for a gunshot wound in his arm that he’d received during his capture. Additionally, he’d been provided with antibiotic pills.

Beats sodomy with a light stick.

I don’t normally go for conspiracy theories, but here’s a fun little timeline I cooked up this morning:

October – December 2003 Members of 800th MP Brigade take photos and videos of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in sexually humiliating positions. 19 January 2004 Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez makes request that an Investigating Officer investigate reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib. 31 January 2004 Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba is appointed to conduct the investigation into abuse at Abu Ghraib. 1 February 2004 Janet Jackson’s right breast is exposed by Justin Timberlake during Superbowl XXXVIII half-time show. 2 February 2004 FCC Chairman Michael Powell — the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former Army general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and someone who still has numerous contacts within the military and Defense department — condemns the Jackson episode and promises a clamp-down on obscenity on the airwaves. mid-February 2004 Maj. Gen. Taguba completes his report on Abu Ghraib. March and April 2004 CBS’s “60 Minutes II” prepares a story on the Abu Ghraib abuse and the Army’s investigation, based on the Taguba report. mid-April 2004 The Defense department and current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Meyers ask “60 Minutes II” to delay broadcast of their report on abuse at Abu Ghraib. 28 April 2004 CBS’s “60 Minutes II” broadcasts story on Abu Ghraib abuse, including doctored images of naked Iraqi prisoners, as the story was about to break in other news outlets around the world.

Now, if you thought the response to the Superbowl show was a bit overblown, you might be inclined by the confluence of events around the end of January and beginning of February to believe that someone in the Army tipped off Colin Powell in January that there was some ugly stuff about to blow out of Iraq. Janet Jackson unknowingly (?) gave Powell’s son a chance to help the administration by trying to put a clamp on broadcast of sexually-humiliating pictures. Just because it didn’t work doesn’t mean they didn’t try.

Or, it could just be a coincidence.

Joe Conason, in a Salon article titled “Smear Boat Veterans for Bush” details the inner workings of a group of U.S. Navy officers who are in league with operatives for the Bush campaign to denigrate the Vietnam service record of John Kerry. According to John O’Neill, a founder of the group and someone who debated Kerry in 1971 on TV, 19 of 23 officers who served with Kerry have signed a letter declaring he is unfit to be commander-in-chief.

I’d humbly like to point out that it’s a lot easier for people to complain about your fitness when you actually served with them. We can’t get yeas or nays from any of the folks Bush served with in his time with the Alabama Air National Guard. Despite Garry Trudeau of “Doonesbury” fame offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove they’d served in Alabama with Bush, there’s been nothing. Their silence is deafening.