Under The Same Sun

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July 30, 2004

Dishonest Hot Air: Priceless

CPA’s own estimate of how much was needed just to rebuild the firehouses in Iraq, 165 of which were destroyed by the war and the subsequent looting: $290 million.

Of the 18.4 billion Iraq reconstruction package, the total amount that has actually been spent on everything--security, water, healthcare, schools, roads, everything-- as of June 22, 2004: $366 million.

Iraq's -not American taxpayer's- own money spent on importing oil through contracts awarded mostly to Halliburton or other non-Iraqi companies, without any competitive bids: $1.07 billion.

Iraqi money turned over to American officers as cash, to disburse as they please without receipts or audits: $360 million.

Likely impact of Kerry’s statement that “we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America”: Iraqis rolling their eyes in unison.

Posted by zeynep at 12:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 29, 2004

No Abu Ghraib, More False Victimology

Wednesday came and passed and no prime time speaker seems to have talked mentioned "torture," "abuse," or "Abu Ghraib" -- including Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. (Below are Wednesday's prime time speakers, whose transcripts were up, who did not use any of the magic words:)

Senator Bob Graham
Governor Jennifer Granholm
Hon. Cheryl Jacques
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Governor Bill Richardson
Al Sharpton

But, we heard the word "Iraqi"! From the mouth of the vice-presidential nominee, no less:

With a new president who strengthens and leads our alliances, we can get NATO to help secure Iraq. We can ensure that Iraq's neighbors like Syria and Iran, don't stand in the way of a democratic Iraq. We can help Iraq's economy by getting other countries to forgive their enormous debt and participate in the reconstruction. We can do this for the Iraqi people and we can do it for our own soldiers. And we will get this done right.

See, right there, towards the end of that paragraph. And yes, odious debt should be dropped; and not just in countries we happen to have occupied but in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. I'll skip trying to point out how wrong the beginning of the paragraph is.

And also, here's another shameful swipe from Tom Daschle:

South Dakotans reject the defeatist view that we have enough money to rebuild Iraq, but can’t afford to take care of our needs here. They wonder how we can build new schools in Iraq, while so many American schools are crumbling. And it doesn’t make sense to them that we’re paying over $2 for gasoline at home, while American taxpayers are funding nickel-a-gallon gas in Iraq. Americans aren’t asking for special deals from Washington. They simply want their government to do right by America.

As I keep writing, that gasoline was subsidized almost totally by Iraqi money --with huge profits going to American companies-- and not with American taxpayer money. In fact, we aren't building much of anything in Iraq. (Here's yet another revelation of a billion dollars of Iraqi money we spent without receipts. Oops.)

Posted by zeynep at 08:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

I was joking; they're not

Couple days ago, I wrote that the boundaries of the national debate on how to approach soldiers who have killed or tortured in Iraq seems to be limited by whether to recommend Prozac or Valium, shopping or vacation. I was lacking in imagination. That's the limits of national debate on underemployed workers as well. Thanks to Billmon.

Posted by zeynep at 07:41 PM | Comments (1)

July 28, 2004

Abu Ghraib, you said?

I am yet to hear the words "torture," "abuse," or "Abu Ghraib" mentioned anywhere in the Democratic National Convention. Admittedly, I haven't been watching the whole thing minute by minute so I did a search of the transcripts of speeches made available on the Dems own website. None of the people below uttered any of those words. In fact, they didn't even say the word "Iraqi" at any point. Let's pretend they don't exist, okay?

Speakers at the 2004 Democratic Convention who did not mention the words "torture," "abuse," "Abu Ghraib," or "Iraqi" for that matter:

Roberta Achtenberg
David Alston
Rep. Tammy Baldwin
Marcia Bristo
President Jimmy Carter
President Bill Clinton
Senator Hillary Clinton
Howard Dean
Rep. Rosa DeLauro
Rep. John Dingell
Shirley Franklin
Rep. Richard Gephardt
Vice-President Al Gore
Teresa Heinz Kerry
Barack Obama

Even the great liberal hope Barack Obama expressed no concern about the fate of Iraqis. I suppose when he said my brother's and my sister's keeper, he meant my American brothers and sisters only. (In fact he sounded very much like Clinton to me.) Worse, a shameful swipe came from Rep. Tammy Baldwin who said "If our leaders can promise 'health care for all' to Iraq, why can't we do the same here at home?"

I don't know what else to say but to call it shameful. We crippled the place with economic sanctions for 10 years, bombed its infrastructure, occupied it and spent their money on profits for American companies -- and they don't even have reliable potable water because that wasn't our priority as to how we spent their money! Their kids are dying of cholera and we're pretending that we have promised health care to all Iraqis, and that's done in the name of progressive values?

This false pretense, that somehow our spending of money on Iraq is what's cause decline of services in America is a great victory of imperialist ideology. It's sad to see it repeated, and even embraced, by progressives.

This country is more than rich enough to provide health care to its citizens and help reconstruct a country it has wrecked. Its leaders are doing neither, by choice. The sooner American progressives stop implying money spent on Iraqis are robbing them of anything, the sooner they will be able to actually fight for their rights by focusing on the accurate targets.

Posted by zeynep at 12:40 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 27, 2004

The Road Not Taken

During the prime-time hour of the first day of the Democratic Convention, Haleema Salie talked with a quivering, accented English about her daughter, son-in-law, and unborn grandchild who were on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11 and how, on that day, we seemed resolved to be a better people; she was followed by 16-year-old violinist Gabe Lefkowitz’s beautiful, unpretentious rendition of "Amazing Grace," the ultimate Christian song of redemption written by a slave-trader who became an abolitionist following a miraculous survival in a treacherous storm.

It made me ache for the road not taken after 9/11: a soul-searching nation, an honest dialogue about our place in the world, a repudiation of all that is revealed as inconsequential by tragedy... If only this stuff occurred to the Democrats when not scripting long televised commercials paid by large corporations and public funds.

Still, it would have been moving even if it were an ad for Halliburton.

Posted by zeynep at 04:02 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The Biggest Killer

My guess would be that the biggest killer in Iraq today is water-borne diseases, as it was during the decade-long sanctions administered by the United States and the United Kingdom in the deadliest of fashions.

The badly needed contracts for rebuilding the water and public works were given to large American companies, such as Bechtel, notorious for its pernicious role in water privatization in Bolivia. Now the New York Times is reporting that about a quarter of that money that was supposed to be spent on clean water is being spent on administrative and security costs, effectively reducing ultimate capacity by half:

An official in the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works who is intimately familiar with the numbers confirmed that most of the extra costs come about because the prime contractors are Western. Western companies typically hire large numbers of private security guards, set up elaborate base camps and travel only in heavily guarded convoys, offer much higher salaries than Iraqi companies, pay skyrocketing insurance premiums and require much more administrative support in order to comply with stringent American regulations.

Of course, much less would be necessary if the contracts were directly awarded to Iraqi companies who will end up doing the work anyway when it finally gets subcontracted to them for pittance.

Still, Iraqis would be grateful for any level of service, even if American cronies made out like bandits. Even that's not happening. Half the projects aren't even beyond the planning stage.

One excuse is that "Iraqi companies did not generally have the ability to comply with American rules on accountability and transparency in the use of public funds," and that "the time was required to go through the normal process of assuring that American taxpayer money is being spent responsibly."

I must say, it brings tears to my eyes to see this concern over how public funds are spent. I just wish it had been there while spending almost $20 billion of Iraqi money in a mad dash. All the while, of course, refusing to comply with the U.N. mandated audits, refusing to explain where the money went, or how Halliburton ended up with non-competitive contracts paid for with Iraqi money.

Posted by zeynep at 03:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 26, 2004

Glorious Achievement Responding to a Hostile Crowd of People

870th Military Police Unit, stationed in Abu Ghraib during last year, has just marked the third month of their return from Iraq. None of the soldiers has been charged with abusing prisoners but many were involved in the riot of November 2003, which resulted in three inmates being fatally shot -- but that doesn't count because according to the official Army investigation the killings were justified. That’s all the national discussion we seem to have had on the subject, in spite of a lot of stuff in the Taguba report regarding the conditions that led to the riot.

According to the full annexes of the Taguba report, which seems to have receded into dusty shelves of bureaucracy in favor of quick exonerations, here's a summary of what happened on November 24th:

The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 23 when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad,'" another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers around the wire..." Guards feared for their lives "the sky was black with rocks," the report said, and a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn't know whether they were using lethal or non-lethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns.

Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.

So, we know there is widespread torture, the nature of which we know thanks to the pornographic impulses of the torturers, and detainees walking in knee-deep mud and human waste, and officers wondering why they aren't rioting every day. When a riot does finally occur, the soldiers don't know confuse when they are shooting with live ammo with when they are not.

Those facts alone should have prompted the top brass to launch a full-scale investigation, even if they didn’t know order what was going on as they keep claiming.

They chose to walk down a different path:

Pvt. David Ruth, who killed one inmate during the riot with a shot to the head from a light machine gun, received a medal on Saturday "for glorious achievement responding to a hostile crowd of people."

Glorious achievement responding to a hostile crowd of people.

Here's another look at the riot from the Taguba report:

h. (U) 24 November 03- Riot and shooting of 12 detainees # 150216, #150894, #153096, 153165, #153169, #116361, #153399, #20257, #150348, #152616, #116146, and #152156 at Abu Ghraib... Several detainees allegedly began to riot at about 1300 in all of the compounds at the Ganci encampment. This resulted in the shooting deaths of 3 detainees, 9 wounded detainees, and 9 injured US Soldiers. A 15-6 investigation by COL Bruce Falcone (220th MP Brigade, Deputy Commander) concluded that the detainees rioted in protest of their living conditions, that the riot turned violent, the use of non-lethal force was ineffective, and, after the 320th MP Battalion CDR executed "Golden Spike," the emergency containment plan, the use of deadly force was authorized.

What's more scary? To read about awards for "glorious achievement responding to a hostile crowd," something that seems right out of the latest issue of Führer, Volk und Vaterland? Fatally shot detaines identifed by six digits? A plan for shooting to kill called the “Golden Spike”?

The fact that the November riot did not serve as a wake-up call is telling of Army's intentions. In fact, lacking guidance from leadership towards improving the conditions that led to the riot -- again, think about it, living conditions were appalling, torture was openly practiced, and as Red Cross reported, 70 to 80 percent of detainees were guilty of no more than being swept up in raids-- if furthered soldiers fear and animosity towards the prisoners. The same Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion, who told Taguba that he wondered that there weren't riots every day said that it made "people aware that those prisoners in there are enemies. They are not your friends, they are not people who you will ever go out and have a beer with."

Meanwhile, another other soldier who killed two detainees that day talked about "intense memories":

Sgt. Terry Stowe, who killed two prisoners in the riot, said the memories remained intense and still filled his dreams.

"I'm still looking for a job, still looking for a house," he said. "Still trying to get my life together."

Maybe we can have a national debate on the subject, after all. Should Sgt. Stowe go shopping or go on a vacation? Should he take Prozac or Valium?

Posted by zeynep at 02:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Operation Hearts and Minds, A-OK.

From a protest in the Cotbato City, Phillipines where the U.S. is holding "counter-terrorism military training" in conjunction with Filipino troops.

Is it just me, or do the current methods of "fighting terrorism" and "winning hearts and minds" seem to be not working?

Posted by zeynep at 12:52 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Surprise! It was a few bad apples!

Army's Inspector General released a report last week on its own investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. They also chose the day the 9/11 report was released to announce the report.

A few bad apples. Nothing systemic. Senior Commanders not at fault. Did I say a few bad apples?

The report is so bad that both New York Times and the Washington Post unequivocally dubbed it a whitewash.

This, after the Defense Dept. promised to leave "no stone unturned"?

Naah, too blatant an attempt to bury the story and launder the military. Modern methods of thought control require more finesse and less clunk. Rumsefld may be right, the military is in need of adapting to the 21st century. A bit of remorse, a bit of the truth, a bit of concession to the systemic nature of the problem... Then you can get away with murder.

Posted by zeynep at 12:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 25, 2004

You Know Your Pants are on Fire When

You know what everyone thinks of your standards of truthfulness when the BBC, an outfit known for stuffy language and by-the-book reporting, uses irony quotes to report that your military records have been “found”:

Bush 1972 Payroll Records 'Found'

Earlier this month the Pentagon said it had inadvertently destroyed the documents, but a spokesman said they have been found in the city of Denver.

You know, those records that were reported as having been “inadvertently destroyed.” Even more miraculously, the newly “found” records don’t offer any proof that Bush served any time with the Alabama Guard in the summer of 1972.

And frankly, even if he did, are people going to turn around and forget that the fact that he was in the guard at all, and thus out of the draft, was an incredible expression of privilege. Because his last name was Bush, he was jumped to the front of a hundreds long waiting list .

Posted by zeynep at 11:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 23, 2004

Be All the C You Can Be

The New Yorker is reporting that the Army is offering free breast enlargement and liposuction to soldiers. Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that the Army is struggling with recruiting goals and "has been forced to bring more new recruits immediately into the ranks to meet recruiting goals for 2004, instead of allowing them to defer entry until the next accounting year, which starts in October."

Here's the Reuters piece:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has long lured recruits with the slogan "Be All You Can Be," but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on the taxpayers' dime.

The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free -- something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.

"Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Dr. Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine, which said soldiers needed the approval of their commanding officers to get the time off.

Between 2000 and 2003, military doctors performed 496 breast enlargements and 1,361 liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents, the magazine said.

The magazine quoted an Army spokeswoman as saying, "the surgeons have to have someone to practice on."

Given the lack of significant domestic political opposition to imperial politics, the U.S. elite seems to face challenges only in being able to maintain tools appropriate to the running of an empire. In other words, they face problems internal to their actions and very little from outside forces like the barely alive anti-war movement.

That does not mean that the two problems, the mechanisms of empire and the methods of keeping the domestic population content, are separate. In fact, they are closely linked. The politics necessary to ensure domestic acquiescence create their own difficult problems: it's hard to tell people to continue shopping like there was no tomorrow, remain deadly scared of terrorist attacks, ignore U.S. foreign policy and its effects on the world, and sign up for the military in spite of the growing awareness that you may lose a limb while gaining a steady paycheck.

A difficult tightrope act is necessary to try to keep the messages separate: the poor should join the army and the rest should spend. It's not that simple, though, since a crucial ingredient in maintaining legitimacy for the system rests upon the widespread belief that this is indeed a land of opportunity, that people have a chance to join the upper echelons with some hard work and some luck. By necessity the messages have to overlap.

The army spokesperson says that "the benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient.... We do it to maintain our skills,” which he added, "are are critical when it comes to doing reconstructive surgery on soldiers who have been wounded."

How do you reconcile the irony here? The main reason military needs plastics surgeons is that wars create many people in need of reconstructive surgery. The fate of the war wounded gets delicate treatment on intellectual mags, yet this society abhors perceived bodily imperfections, let alone major disfigurement. So military personnel who have nothing wrong with them except in comparison to the artificial, unattainable and inhuman standards of a society receive free plastic surgery so that the surgeons can have more practice in putting somewhat back together people whose faces or bodies were blown off.

Of course, as another surgeon replies, some of it are just pure incentive for the enlisted personnel and not at all for the benefit of the surgeons :

Dr. Shaun Parson, a prominent cosmetic surgeon in Arizona, says that cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery are two separate specialties. "If the Army is doing breast augmentations," he says, "it's doing it to practice breast augmentations, period."

Here's one of the recipients of free plastic surgery, talking of her despair with her previous looks, sounding straight out of Extreme Makeover:

Janis Garcia, a former lieutenant commander and jag attorney in the Navy, who is married to a retired Navy fighter pilot, says she grew up hating the way she looked. “I wouldn’t even smile in my own wedding pictures.” She checked in to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego for a nose job, a chin realignment, and a jaw reconstruction, free of charge. She also had her teeth straightened. “It changed my appearance drastically, and I became a more confident person,” she said. “It literally changed the direction of my life.” The doctors told her the work she had done would have cost her nearly a hundred thousand dollars.

The numbers are telling. The New Yorker reports that in 2000 and 2003, military doctors "performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions." Meanwhile, Iraq Military Casualty Count website reports that there were 3,331 soldiers wounded seriously enough since April of 2003 that they could not return to duty after seventy-two hours. So it seems like one is much more likely to lose a leg than gain a cup size.

Another mechanism used for cohesion in the military is a curious mixture of "manifest destiny" and "American-supremacy" -- the idea that we as a nation are the best and the brightest, with a unique mission and a special mandate. It's not the same thing as racism, and it cannot be since this is a multiracial country, but it shares characteristics with racism, in particular the idea that others are inferior.

Now, such an ideology is great for maintaining internal cohesion in the army which brings together white rural poor who often grasp at white-supremacy to make up for their disadvantaged station in life with urban black poor and mostly newly immigrant Latinos. Unfortunately for the warmakers, this makes for a very bad ideology for running an occupation because a military held together by its own feelings of superiority while simultaneously drawing its members from the lowest rungs of society cannot treat the natives gently. It simply cannot win hearts and minds when it is subjected to a massive hearts and minds operation by the elite. As a result, we now have an occupation which should have been manageable, at least for a while given that it was replacing the horrific regime of Saddam Hussein, but which has instead turned into a hated regime that most Iraqis want expelled.

Posted by zeynep at 10:34 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

July 22, 2004

Not Even a Slap on the Wrist

CACI, a private contractor implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, has been quietly investigated and let off the hook by the Army.

CACI, self-described provider of "interrogation and analyst support services to the U.S. Army in Iraq," said that "the Army was satisfied the company did not do anything illegal while dealing with Iraqis in its capacity as a government contractor brought on after the occupation."

Shares were up 37 cents.

Correction: John B. Israel worked for another private contractor, Titan, and not CACI as yesterday's post erroneously stated. Thanks much to Another Ted for the correction.

Posted by zeynep at 08:54 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 21, 2004

Second Time the Charm?

In an informative post explaining the similarities between the current economic environment and the pre-"New Deal" economy, Billmon highlights a striking fact about the current non-inflationary environment: partitioning of economic gains between the workers and the bosses has to come through explicit action. In other words, some of the mechanisms through which class warfare could be carried out circuitously depended on the presence of mild inflation, which seems no longer to be the case. Circuitous mechanisms help greatly with continuing to pull ideological blinders over people's eyes. One can imagine that most people would protest loudly if their paychecks had a line-item called "deduction for corporate welfare."

As Greenspan himself noted in his testimony yesterday, productivity gains have been gobbled into profitability rather than shared with wage-earners. There are many factors going into this result all of which add up to the fact that workers have been steadily losing leverage with which to force employers to share the spoils. Greenspan expects the trend to slowly even out and result in increased wages, but then what's he supposed to say?

Here's the kicker. In the past, inflation would slowly eat into wages, requiring some form of regular adjustment. Regular adjustment was expected and non-noteworthy. And every adjustment provided an opportunity for quietly realigning the division of the surplus between profits and wages. By keeping the adjustment somewhat below the rate of inflation, employers could eat into wages while still providing nominal "raises." In the current environment, they have to push wage-cuts -- and history has shown that people are much more resistant to nominal wage-cuts than they are to declines in their real wages accompanied by a nominal increase.

In other words, if a worker were earning $100 this year and boss offers $98 for next year (in a non-inflationary environment) one can't but immediately notice what's going on. It's much more confusing when you are offered $102 in an environment with, say 4 or 5 percent inflation.

In other words, the economic structure (which is to say, the social structure) of Old Deal America has been at least partially recreated. But that means workers and employers are once again confronting each other directly across the table. If wages need to be frozen, or cut, to keep them in line with the global competitive realities, or to meet Wall Street's relentless demands for earning growth - employers will have to do it. Inflation isn't going to do the job for them. Conversely, if workers want a raise, they're going to have to fight for it. The New Deal social convention of "X plus inflation" won't do it for them.

See a pattern here? We have inequality levels approaching the Gilded Age, "Old Deal" patterns of inflation and wage returns, a stock market bubble has just burst...

Let's just say that I'm still torn about the WPA's Federal Arts Project and wouldn't mind a rerun.

Posted by zeynep at 05:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Micronesia, We Hardly Know You

One more General Assembly resolution where the United States is joined by Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau against practically the whole rest of the world (this time around Australia, and Israel, also voted with the U.S.).

Well, I finally got curious. Who are these countries and why are they voting with the United States so consistently? Turns out that they are former colonies of the United States, formerly known collectively as the "Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands" and they continue to be heavily dependent on U.S. aid and house U.S. military bases.

Micronesia was under Japanese control until World War II when it became a U.S. colony, formally achieving semi-independence only in 1986. The islands were colonized by Germany before World War I and by Spain before 1889. Currently it has a "Compact of Free Association" with the United States and is heavily dependent on U.S. aid. According to CIA factbook, its annual GDP of $240 million is supplemented by an additional $100 million dollars in aid. There is also a U.S. military base in these islands of about 100,000 mostly subsistence farmers and fishers.

It's basically the same story for Palau and the Marshall Islands. Palau is the smallest of the bunch, population 19,000, and it became "independent" only in 1994. Marshall Islands is right next to Micronesia with about 50,000 people. Perhaps the most striking encapsulation of where it stands is in the global pecking order is the fact its atolls were used for nuclear testing by the United States between 1947 and 1962. All these islands were also ravaged by bombing by both sides, U.S. and Japan, during World War II.

Stephen Shalom had a good article last year in Znet summarizing a history of U.S. isolation in the General Assembly. The pattern is so clear that it's hard to comment much about it.

Posted by zeynep at 04:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 20, 2004

The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out. The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out. The Inspectors Were Withdrawn, Not Kicked Out.

From today's AP report on the possible return of the IAEA inspectors to Iraq:

Instead, they [the inspectors] will be performing a routine task that even Iraq's ousted President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) allowed the U.N. agency to carry out after barring U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq in the wake of U.S. and British bombing raids in December 1998.

This lie has been refuted so many times that it gets tiresome to constantly correct it. I suppose that's the difficulty of correcting problems that are caused by structural factors; the lies naturally propagate while efforts to correct them are time-consuming and difficult. Over time, the liars overwhelm the truth-tellers. And the biggest lies are the big picture lies, which are much harder to correct than these smaller, factual lies. A big lie takes a sentence; a proper refutation might need take a book.

On the lighter side, El-Baradei wants to play house:

"The return of international inspectors to Iraq is considered necessary, not to search for the weapons of mass destruction, but so the agency can write a final report on the non-presence of weapons of mass destruction so the international community can lift sanctions on Iraq," ElBaradei said.

Uh-huh. Right. "International community." "Lift sanctions". "On Iraq." How quaint, ye olde chap.

Posted by zeynep at 10:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Green is the New Black; Iran is the The New Threat

I remember being greatly amused upon learning the "[insert color] is the new black" turn of phrase -- pink is the new black, red is the new black, you know. So, we now learn that Iran is the new threat. Well, "old-new" threat so even that's like fashion: since there are only so many variations to clothes, fads cycle through semi-regularly, probably at a rate finely calculated to ensure maximal waste. Since we also have only so many nation-states located in geopolitically important regions with repressive regimes that can be targeted with some cover of legitimacy, we have to cycle through them too.

So, there we go. Bush says they will investigate 9/11 links to Iran; CIA downplays the possibility of a link; Iran calls the allegations ridiculous.

Here's where the deja vu diverges. Iran is not a crumbling, totalitarian state. It's a strong, repressive regime. There is a big difference. Plus, Iran has genuine sizable domestic opposition. It may or may not make United States' plans easier. It could provide internal leverage against the regime. Then again, the existence of strong domestic forces mean that it's hard to create a sustainable, pliant client-regime. While Reza Pahlavi hang on for decades, back then domestic social forces in Iran were much weaker and much less organized.

It will be a shame if the progressives once again largely ignore the fact that Iran's regime is very repressive and very unpopular, as they seemed to do with Iraq pre-invasion. It may not be a convenient fact for those wishing to oppose imperialism first and foremost; but ignoring facts does not seem to make them go away. It's a thorny question and it should not be left only to disingenious imperialist apologists who will forget their feigned concern for the people at the drop of a bomb.

Posted by zeynep at 09:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 19, 2004

More Stun Gun Fun

I know I seem to be stuck on these Taser shocking devices while car bombs blow up in Iraq, a genocidal wave of violence continues to drown Sudan in blood and the 9/11 commission seems ready to partially blame Iran for the attacks because 8 to 10 of the hijackers legally entered Iran. By the way, if that's all the evidence linking Iran to the hijackers, I'd like to point out that 19 of the 19 hijackers legally entered the United States. What's Iran supposed to do in order to avoid suspicion: keep a better tab on suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists than the United States was able to?

But I'm really amazed by the Taser gun story partly because I expect to see them in the near future at a peace rally or a protest outside a trade organization meeting and partly because it is such a shocking display of corporate malfeasance resulting in huge payoffs for the corporate malfeasants.

So, while Taser's stock shot up from less than $2 to $60 over the course of two years, the company kept denying that the Taser had anything to do with the 50-odd people who happened to have died after being shocked. It claimed that it was basing its denials on on coroners' reports. Well, alleged coroner's reports, it turns out.

The Arizona Republic set out to obtain the autopsies for the 42 cases of death following shocks that were cited in refutations by Taser. Taser claimed that "the stun guns were cleared each and every time."

After obtaining only 22 of the autopsy reports, the Arizona Republic reported that in some of the cases the doctors had either specifically blamed the Taser shock or had concluded it could not be ruled out. That's hardly "cleared each and every time." What's Taser's response?

When presented with cases linking Tasers to deaths, Smith says the medical examiners got it wrong and dismisses their reports.

Smith says medical examiners are generalists who don't have the expertise needed to analyze deaths involving the stun gun. And they often "throw everything" into autopsy reports as a way to cover themselves so they can't be accused of missing something later on.

"There is no penalty for a coroner to be overly broad," Smith says. "These guys deal with the whole broad spectrum of what can go wrong in the human body. Am I going to expect that they are going to be right 100 percent of the time? No."

Smith says his company's report presents the "big picture" of Taser-related deaths. He says it proves that Tasers are not to blame and that actual autopsies are not needed to summarize each case.

"I know in my heart what the truth is," Smith says. "Taser hasn't killed any of these people."

As you can tell from the quote, they hadn't even based their analysis on the actual autopsy in each case but had used whatever anectodal sources, third-party reporting, campus newspapers and whatever suited them. They must have calculated nobody would bother looking them up -- clearly related to an understanding that the class of victims, "suspects," do not have too many defenders and investigators with clout.

Plus, the cause of deaths occurring following Taser shocks seem to follow broadly similar patterns, further reinforcing the obvious point. It may also be that the Taser is even more lethal in people who are under the influence of drugs that induce tachycardia, such as crack and cocaine. While it's hardly wise or advisable to use such drugs, or worse yet, to engage in any kind of activity that could possibly involve a confrontation with the police while intoxicated, since when is death the penalty for drug addiction?

But leave aside all the details, here's my point: we have a very clear case of a corporation blatantly lying about a very dangerous product and making off like a bandit during the process. They have gotten away with it so far and if they manage to weather the current meager level of media interest, all may yet end well in Taserville. The original founders of the company have already sold at about $40 millions of dollars of stock and own another $130 million worth.

The victims are the kinds of people that don't count: they are poor, they are most likely people of color, they they are the kind of people one sees portrayed so degradingly in television shows like Cops. We watch them drunk, high, half-dressed, acting stupid, hancuffed, disheveled, sometimes guilty of nothing more than living in the wrong neighborhood and sometimes plenty guilty of speeding down the highway at breakneck speeds and recklessly endangering everyone around. They just seem less than human.

Just compare the Taser story with the amount of attention the media has shown to the West Nile virus, a fairly rare disease transmitted by mosquitos which is relatively fatal for the elderly and the already frail. According to the CDC, a total of 246 Americans were killed in all of last year from the disease -- yet there have been many times that the evening newscast opens with the West Nile as the main story of the day. The reason for the difference is obvious: the West Nile virus can strike accross class and racial boundaries, Tasers don't.

Posted by zeynep at 06:42 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 17, 2004

Who Needs Safety Studies? My Heart and Soul and Wallet Say It's Safe (on Other People).

A long and scary article in the New York Times about the Taser stun guns now carried by more than 100,000 police officers in the United States and coming soon to a Radio Shack near you. Although 50 people have died since 2001 after being shocked with the Taser, and although studies done by non-company flacks, in Britain, Canada and the United States, have found that they are not safe my any definition of the term, potentially lethal to be more precise, we can all rest assured:

Patrick Smith, Taser's chief executive, said the guns are safe. "We tell people that this has never caused a death, and in my heart and soul I believe that's true," Mr. Smith said.

How is it that Martha Stewart goes to jail five months for a lousy, small-potatoes insider deal while this man is not charged with reckless endangerment, manslaughter and "lethal fraud," a criminal category that does not but should exist? You compare: she's annoying, he's accessory to murder.

Posted by zeynep at 05:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Real Threat

The Pentagon is indeed proceeding with its plans to provide sham reviews for the Guantanamo detainees in order to avoid providing any meaningful due process.

The Pentagon is moving at "extraordinary speed" to provide "special military hearings" where the detainees may challenge their designation as 'enemy combatant,' The New York Times reports today.

They won't have lawyers, mind you, just a military officer who will act as a "representative." And the cases will be decided by three military officers. There's your due process, the Pentagon hopes to say.

Gordon R. England, the secretary of the Navy, who put together the Pentagon's plan, said at a press briefing Friday that the first hearing might take place late next week. He said officials hoped to get quickly to a point of moving 72 detainees a week through the process.

"We're confident that we will finish this, on the outside, in three to four months," Mr. England said, though he acknowledged that the procedures to be followed at the hearings were not yet complete.

One military lawyer noted that the Pentagon usually moved in a more deliberate fashion; its plans for military commissions to try some detainees for war crimes were developed more than two years ago, for instance, and there has yet to be a commission proceeding. Of the new review process, the lawyer said, "This is like moving at the speed of light for the military.''

As the article notes, many of the detainees may end up simply being released. Which, of course, begs the question: why are they being released now if they were supposedly so dangerous? If they are non-dangerous enough to be released rather than fight for their continued detention in a court of law, why were they held for so many years?

Pentagon officials and the defense lawyers appear to agree that the hearings may well bring a significant reduction in Guantánamo's population. Asked what would happen when a tribunal deemed detainees not to be unlawful combatants, Mr. England replied, "They go home."

The moral of the story seems to be that they'd rather let these people go than provide due process. Is it possible that due process itself is more dangerous to the aims of these warmakers than the detainees they told us were so dangerous?

Posted by zeynep at 05:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 16, 2004

Is this any way to run an occupation?

The Bush administration is withholding information from U.N.-sanctioned auditors examining more than $1 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. and other companies in Iraq without competitive bidding, the head of the international auditing board said Thursday.

Lest you think this is nitpicking, the numbers involved are quite large. Just Halliburton alone has been awarded at least $1.4 billion worth of contracts without competitive bids from May 2003 to December 2003. There may be other contracts awarded without competition, we don't know. We don't know because the United States is refusing to turn over the documents to the U.N.-mandated audit body.

Remember, this is not U.S. money -- this is all Iraqi revenues and assets. Of course, there are sizable non-competitive bids going to Halliburton with U.S. taxpayer money too but audit requirements on those are tougher. It's not that they aren't reckless with American lives or money, but clearly Iraqi money is easier to usurp, just as Iraqi lives are easier to waste.

Meanwhile, a few days back, L.A. Times had reported that "Advocates of War Now Profit From Iraq's Reconstruction."

Lobbyists, aides to senior officials and others encouraged invasion and now help firms pursue contracts.They see no conflict. ... As lobbyists, public relations counselors and confidential advisors to senior federal officials, they warned against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, praised exiled leader Ahmad Chalabi, and argued that toppling Saddam Hussein was a matter of national security and moral duty.

Now, as fighting continues in Iraq, they are collecting tens of thousands of dollars in fees for helping business clients pursue federal contracts and other financial opportunities in Iraq.

I swear, is this any way to run an occupation? Is this just stupidity and cronyism? Arrogance and hubris? A very clever and devious plan the full-scope of which is still to be revealed? Are they just plain dumb? Are these guys secret anti-imperialists? They run things in the worst possible manner so that the U.S. imperial project takes a hit as angry Americans join hands with the disgusted global public in order to dismantle it? Are they just trying to bring about the end of the world as quickly as possible?

Is this any way to run an occupation?

Posted by zeynep at 01:32 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 15, 2004

What Conflict of Interest? Abner Mason, Drug-Industry Frontman and Presidential Advisor on HIV/AIDS, Takes Out a Full Page Ad Attacking Generics

The 15th international conference on AIDS is taking place in Bangkok this week. As I wrote earlier, the Bush administration held back key scientists from attending, citing costs even though AMA was going to pick up the tab for some of the scientists held back -- the U.S. delegation is a third of the size of the delegation that attended the Barcelona conference.

But money is apparently no object to Abner Mason’s group “AIDS Responsibility Project.” The frount group for the drug industry, concentrating mainly against lobbying efforts to block generic drugs boasts Abner Mason as its apparent sole employee and president. Abner Mason also happens to be a member of Bush administration’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He just forgot to disclose his group was funded by big pharma. ::slap forehead:: After all, this is the administration that openly appointed Randall Tobias, former CEO of drug giant and Eli Lilly, which has strong ties to the Republicans, to head its global AIDS taskforce. He might have figured it’s okay and omitted any such mention from his website.

So, Abner Mason’s group takes out a full page ad in Bangkok Post the day the conference begins, attacking generics with bogus claims. More and more data came out at the conference showing that generic drugs are safe, effective and better than patented drugs in many cases because the multiple separately-patented drugs an HIV patient has to take to stay alive can be combined by generic drug-makers.

But what’s safety, efficacy, or the lives of millions of people when some pharma profits are on the line?

In any case, this administration never saw a conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety it didn’t like.

Meanwhile, the government’s own watchdog, Government Accountability Office just released a report examining the administration’s own bilateral drug program that is kept separate from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis. Among its findings are that the on-the-ground staff feels overwhelmingly hindered by “U.S. policy constraints,” specifically the procurement of generics, and wants more coordination and cooperation with the international bodies and existing programs.

Posted by zeynep at 09:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 14, 2004

Gay Marriage Amendment Scuttled Just as the Administration Prefers

A perfect outcome for the administration: the gay-marriage amendment did not pass the Senate test. Now everyone else can forget about it while the evangalical / fundamentalist base talks about nothing else until November.

It would have been a disaster for the administration if it had passed. Actually modifying the constitution to ban the rights of a group of people irritates many people, even people who are not comfortable with the idea of gay marriage. Plus, if the debate actually continued among the general public there would be all those stories of people who were turned away from the bedside of their dying partners of many decades at the orders of estranged "family" members who had shunned their relative up until that moment. This one is not winnable for the conservatives without greatly damaging any pretense of compassion. It is, however, greatly valuable as a get-the-vote-out issue:

"Four million religious conservative voters sat out the last election, so the president's visible stance on protecting marriage is essential to turning out all of those conservative voters who pulled the lever for him in 2000 and getting those other 4 million to come out for him this year," said Keith Appell, a conservative strategist in Washington.

And I do want to say something to many progressives and radicals who show a lack of enthusiasm for the rights of gay people to marry, rightly pointing out all the problems with the institution of marriage. "What's wrong with civil unions" is often the polite phrasing I hear for "I'm too radical to support marriage for anyone, straight or gay."

Well, nothing wrong with civil unions if that is the the only available civil institution of couplehood for gays and straights alike. In fact, in a sane world, that's what it would be and people who wanted to add a church wedding or a raindance ceremony to their civil union would do so at their own discretion. But so long as that is not the case, so long as there are separate standards for separate types of couples, there is indeed much wrong with civil unions for gays while straights get to marry, even if the institution of marriage ain't always that great. Neither was there anything that great about eating greasy hamburgers at dreary lunch counters in Mississippi during the summer of 1963. Separate standards are an affront to human dignity now, just as they were then.

Posted by zeynep at 05:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

More "Sickening" Details from Abu Ghraib Emerge

There are some new stories about torture and abuse that took place in U.S. detention centers in Iraq. Newsweek has tracked down some of the men pictured in the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures. Their crimes seems to have ranged from stealing cars to kicking members of the Iraqi police:

What if the FBI had tortured Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be 20th hijacker, into revealing the plot to destroy the World Trade Center in time to stop it? Who could blame it? These were not people playing by any rules of civilized warfare, and nor are terrorists in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, military-intelligence officers were concerned about the poor "product" they were getting from prisoner interrogations, and they pressured the military-police guards there to "soften up" their charges between sessions. That, at least, is the defense of the six MPs now facing charges in the scandal. So why did Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. order a young woman to pull her shirt up to her neck? She was an accused prostitute. MPs allegedly ordered Hussein Mohsen Matar to masturbate, and rode on his naked back as he crawled on all fours. He was an accused thief. Haqi Ismail Abdul-Hamid, famously menaced by a snarling dog, had at least kicked an Iraqi policemen and threatened to kill Coalition soldiers. But he was ordered released as a mental case. Not only did military police torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, they often tortured the wrong prisoners.

This paragraph addresses the question that is implied in much of the rhetoric surrounding the Abu Ghraib scandal: would you be opposed to use of torture if assured of saving lives, many lives? It’s hard to say no to that question in the abstract; at worst it just appears as self-indulgent. And that has been the underlying tenor of the rhetoric coming from the torture-apologists. “You’d rather let innocents die,” the argument goes, “rather than participate in something that would dirty your latte-drinking, volvo-driving, manicured hands. At least these boys and girls are washing your dirty laundry for you so stop whining.”

But the question is wrong. It’s like asking which knife you used to kill your victim. Posed as such it seems very straightforward. The formulation is an attempt to circumvent all the problems that arise when use of torture is examined in any specific setting.

First and foremost is this: once torture is an accepted method of information extraction, it will slowly but surely become the method of information extraction. Once tortured, some terrorists will confess that they are planning to blow up civilians. Some people who have no such prior plans will also confess to those plans under torture. Both parties might deny the allegations before the torture. How can you tell one party from the other? Well, by torturing them and then verifying their information. In other words, there is no a priori method of distinguishing between the potential-terrorists and the car-thieves and random people swept-up in raids.

There is also a big problem with any procedure one could imagine for verifying the information obtained through torture. For one thing, torture will produce a glut of information, making it hard to chase every piece of information. Not only does the inevitable overproduction make verification very hard, any “actionable” intelligence obtained will drown in a sea of “stop-torturing-me” intelligence. The deeper structural problem is that lack of verification does not equal falsification. In other words, if someone tells you there is a bomb under the big rock at the corner of the mosque and the school and it’s not there, you might just as well conclude that the torturer’s accomplices had moved the bomb upon learning of his arrest. Torturing other people is not a reliable method of verification either since it does not allow you to escape the fact that people will confess to most anything under torture.

This is how Salem witch trials and the Inquisition worked. The historical progression is relatively straightforward: torture produces a glut of accusations and information which are verified by further torture until all you have is torture.

One could argue that this does not solve the problem of what to do with getting information from actual terrorists. But that objection is like the story of the drunkard who had dropped his keys half a block away but was looking under the streetlight because that’s where the light was. The apparent difficulty in solving one formulation of the problem does not authorize another solution guaranteed not only to not work, but also to make the problem much worse.

And perhaps once in a while, that bomb under that rock will be found -- at a price of maybe hundreds or maybe thousands of people plus maybe thousands or tens of thousands of their relatives who will now be interested in revenge, whereas before being tortured they had no such inclination.

More details comes from the U.S. News and World Report, which has gotten its hands on the full Taguba report and all the annexes. Their story is titled “Hell On Earth: Life in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, newly available documents show, would have made Satan quake.”

One piece of information that is new is that there were earlier reports of egregious misconduct in other detention centers which were effectively dismissed with a slap-on-the-wrist. Is it surprising that the rank-and-file decided that this meant that they had a free had to do what they want with the Iraqis?

Abu Ghraib wasn't the only prison where abuses took place. The problems there, the newly available documents show, had their roots months earlier at another U.S.-run detention center in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca. Evidence showed that MP s viciously attacked prisoners there, including one who had his nose smashed in. Four soldiers were given less than honorable discharges but were not prosecuted. "I'm convinced that what happened [at Abu Ghraib] would never have happened if" the Camp Bucca cases had been prosecuted, Maj. Michael Sheridan, who worked at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba.

A few of the earlier instances involved riots, and detainees being killed during those riots – so those killings are dismissed. But consider some of the circumstances in the prison:

The details are sickening. Noor, a detainee whose full name is being withheld by Newsweek, was forced to expose her breasts and genitalia and is shown in the MPs' pictures giving a forced smile for Graner, who sources believe was the photographer.... Prisoner Satar Jabar's photograph, showing him hooded and wired up, has become familiar to Iraqis, who derisively call it "the Statue of Liberty." Far from being a dangerous insurgent, however, Jabar, 24, was an accused car thief.

Are we surprised that people rioted occasionally? An earlier Red Cross report stated that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees had simply been swept-up by accident. They weren’t even car thieves. One of the officers is quoted as wondering how there is not a riot every day:

Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Company. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.

According to the Taguba report, the private contractors supplying the prisoners with food were not providing edible material, contributing to the tension:

[Maj. David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion] pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt. "As each day goes by, tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. " . . . Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs, or whatever in the food?" Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners, I would take that with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MP s, medics, and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the company holds other contracts with the military.

Posted by zeynep at 04:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 13, 2004

Onward, Vindictive Soldiers

Somedays of the week, I think this is just a typical administration beholden to corporations, committed to unjust global domination. Then there are other days like these and I wonder if any other administration has matched the level of pettiness or the depth of vindictiveness displayed by this bunch. Surely, show of force is necessary to maintain dominance but it is not sufficient. Dominance in a modern liberal capitalist parliamentary regime also requires a sense of legitimacy, some degree of fair play and a limit to what lengths power can go seemingly simply out of spite.

Take the administration’s actions directed at the AIDS conference in Bangkok. They blocked many Americans scientists from attending the conference, citing costs. There are only 50 U.S. government scientists -- compared to 236 that attended the Barcelona conference, according to the Guardian.

The cost excuse isn’t even thinly veiled: the American Medical Association would have paid for some of the government scientists. Those scientists were blocked them anyway.

One obvious issue the administration has with most of the global scientific community is the role of condoms in prevention. Most people think they’re essential. The administration seems to think that is equivalent to aiding and abetting fornication. Still, it’s hard to imagine that’s a reason not to attend the conference -- why not go anyway and instead promote abstinence-based policies?

But I suspect the real reason is that Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, was heckled at the Barcelona conference two years ago. A series of vindictive actions soon followed suit, most notably malicious auditing of 16 groups some of whose members might have joined in with the heckling, especially to see if they had used any federal funds to send participants to the Barcelona conference as if acceptance of federal funds is tantamount to signing away your first amendment rights.

This administration does not forget its enemies, it’s perceived enemies, or for that matter people perceived of not standing strongly enough with the administration against perceived enemies.

This attitude has wide-ranging ramifications. For one thing, I believe that their electoral strategy is less get the much-touted swing-voter and more turn-out the base. This administration is not that suited to appealing to the confused, “can’t we all get along” crowd but it is very well-suited to creating a paranoid environment where fear rules and a sense of unity and purpose among the ranks is fostered.

Posted by zeynep at 02:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 12, 2004

Speaking of Bribery

What do you do when it becomes public that you illegally funneled funds from large corrupt corporations into corrupt activities?

In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.

DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

... Texas law bars corporate financing of state legislature campaigns.

Why, ask for more, of course:

Several weeks ago, DeLay hired two criminal defense attorneys to represent him in the probe. He previously created a fund for corporate donors to help him pay legal bills related to allegations of improper fundraising, and is now considering extending its reach to include the fees for these attorneys.

Even if Delay gets convicted, his success probably makes the temporary, flash-in-the-pan coverage one can expect in today's media environment worth it for the Republican party:

DeLay's fundraising efforts helped produce a stunning political success. Republicans took control of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years, Texas congressional districts were redrawn to send more Republican lawmakers to Washington, and DeLay -- now the House majority leader -- is more likely to retain his powerful post after the November election, according to political experts.

...

By investing as much as $2.5 million in corporate money in the 2002 election, TRMPAC and another group, the Texas Association of Business, were able to help elect 26 new Republican candidates to the Texas House. The new Republican majority then redrew the congressional district boundaries and, as a result, five Democrats are likely to lose in the Nov. 2 election, according to political experts.

Most unfortunately is that it's only the secret corporate cash (the corporations were told that their "contributions" would not be "disclosable" in public records) for elections that's illegal in Texas -- the resdistricting and the myriads of ways corporations can purchase the government are legal.

Redistricting the way Texas GOP got away with isn't just bad because it allows Republicans to maximize electoral control, It's also bad because it creates homogeneous districts where the candidates, assured of re-election and indefinite incumbency, see little reason to moderate their position or engage any opposing point of view. It doesn't just create more Republicans, it creates more extreme Republicans who also happen to undislodgeable. It lessens political dialogue overall and makes a mockery of elections, regardless of the winners it selecs.

Posted by zeynep at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2004

Most Bang for Your Buck: Mass Media

Don’t you always wonder how things like bribery or influence-peddling actually occur? Not in the general sense, but in the minute, day-to-day, detailed manner?

Once in a while it’s so brazen that we learn about it: six days before Clinton took office, Wendy Gramm, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pushed for an exemption from regulation for over-the-counter derivatives, an important portion of Enron’s business. Enron contributed heavily to the campaign of her husband, Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm, and appointed her to the board from which she collected about about a million dollars in stock options and what-not. What more is there to say?

That kind of story is easy to follow. But what about all the little stuff that forms the web of influence corporations have over our government, the revolving doors, the little favors, the corporate-sponsored vacations, all the petty goodies in pursuit of which bureaucrats jump over so many hoops? Our watchdogs, such as they exist, can barely keep up with the large scandals so often we wait for something big to happen, like collapse of Enron and the rigged California energy crisis, in order for subpoenas to roll out and a sustained public exposure to happen.

Wouldn’t you wish that Ken Lay kept some sort of diary? Hired Wendy: one million dollars; paid-off Phil: hundred thousand dollars; unregulated energy futures: priceless. Unfortunately, even if it existed, Lay’s auditors at Arthur Andersen would have made sure it was all shredded: that is their job description after all.

From Peru, comes a meticulous record-keeper, bless his bureaucratic habits, to shed light on the details of influence peddling. Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of Peru's secret service, kept detailed records of all his bribes which were studied by John McMillan of the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and graduate student Pablo Zoido. Here's the story from today's Outlook section of the Washington Post:

"Montesinos kept meticulous records of his transactions," Zoido and McMillan recounted in their paper. "He required those he bribed to sign contracts detailing their obligations to him. He demanded written receipts for the bribes." And if that weren't enough to secure him a place of honor in the Hall of Shame, he "had his illicit negotiations videotaped."

That allowed McMillan and Zoido to tally up the bribes by institution and then compare them to see where Montesinos, in his "expert" opinion, thought it most effective to spend the most money.

So, what was the most important institution to bribe, the most important potential opponent to squash, to buy-off, to silence in order to keep power in your corrupt hands?

It wasn't even close. "One single television channel's bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians' bribes," they found. "By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government's power was the news media."

The totals were staggering. Bribes to the owners of the six largest privately held television stations amounted to millions, with $1.5 million a month flowing to the owner of one station and $500,000 a month to another, while a third got a total of $9 million over an undisclosed period of time. Sometimes the bribes were payments for specific jobs: Montesinos paid the owner of one TV network $50,000 to fire two reporters critical of the government.

By comparison, politicians and judges came relatively cheap. Bribes to 21 judges came in the form of one-time payments that ranged from $2,500 to $55,000. Lawmakers were a bit more pricey: Dozens of opposition party legislators were paid bribes ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 a month, easily outstripping their monthly paychecks.
Newspapers were less of a concern because the overwhelming majority of Peruvians got their news from television, McMillan said. Still, Montesinos paid more than $2 million to the owners or directors of popular newspapers.

The implications of the economists' findings extend far beyond Peru. These findings suggest that if a society wants to prevent corruption, the best weapon is an independent and corruption-free media that can act as a check on the government.

Of course methods are different in the United States since most of mass media is large corporations -- so bribes and threats between the media machinery and the politicians can run a multitudes of ways, both ways. But the lesson seems to be the same: control the media, control the public discussion. Control the public discussion, and you will pull off controlled “democracy.”

Posted by zeynep at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 09, 2004

The Suspect Fell on My Knife, Your Honor. Backwards. Eight Times.

The records from those very months from 1972 that Bush claims he was with an Alabama Guard Unit have been ::drumrolls:: "inadvertently destroyed," according to the Pentagon. Nobody who was in Alabama remembers Bush, and he was suspended from flying because he did not turn up for a medical exam. Those suddenly lost records would have shed light on these questions.

::suspenseful music continues::

No back-up paper copies could be found. There was no explanation of why this loss for records that many news organizations have been demanding for months was not announced before:

Here's the NY Times story:

The disclosure that the payroll records had been destroyed came in a letter signed by C. Y. Talbott, chief of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information Office, who forwarded a CD-Rom of hundreds of records that Mr. Bush has previously released, along with images of punch-card records. Sixty pages of Mr. Bush's medical file and some other records were excluded on privacy grounds, Mr. Talbott wrote.

He said in the letter that he could not provide complete payroll records, explaining, "The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) has advised of the inadvertent destruction of microfilm containing certain National Guard payroll records."

He went on: "In 1996 and 1997, DFAS engaged with limited success in a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. During this process the microfilm payroll records of numerous service members were damaged, including from the first quarter of 1969 (Jan. 1 to March 31) and the third quarter of 1972 (July 1 to Sept. 30). President Bush's payroll records for these two quarters were among the records destroyed. Searches for backup paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful."

Mr. Talbott's office would not respond to questions, saying that further information could be provided only through another Freedom of Information application.

But Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for Defense finance agency in Denver, said the destruction occurred as the office was trying to unspool 2,000-foot rolls of fragile microfilm. Mr. Hubbard said he did not know how many records were lost or why the loss had not been announced before.

Posted by zeynep at 11:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 08, 2004

Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?

Lila Lipscomb, the mother from Flint, Michigan, who was featured at length in Fahrenheit 9/11, explains why she agreed to appear in the movie:

"The reason I didn't hesitate was because I was carrying my son's words with me. And as a mother I have to carry each and every day the fact, could I have done a little bit more? Could I have been more vocal so that the president would not have been given that much authority within himself? And nobody can make that go away. My son got sent into harm's way by a decision made by the president of the United States that was based on a lie. Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?"

Posted by zeynep at 02:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

We will review your status so we can deny you due process

Following the Supreme Court decision, the government is hastily holding hearings to determing the "enemy combatant" status of the Guantanamo detaniees:

The new hearings are designed to determine whether the 595 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, meet the definition of "enemy combatants," as President Bush and the U.S. military have said for more than two years.

Ah, finally, some due process, you say?

Hah, guess again.

The military will review the status of these detainees so that they can argue in federal courts that the detainees have had access to deliberation and all legal obligations required for indefinitely locking them up have been met:

The essential function of the new hearings, officials said, is to help government lawyers argue their cases for continued detention in the habeas corpus hearings that eventually will be held for all detainees. U.S. lawyers would be able to argue that there is no reason for a judge to inquire too deeply into a detainee's case because the government has already deliberated on it, legal experts said.

"When and if there are habeas petitions filed challenging their detention, the government will be in a position to say that we fully satisfied our legal obligations," a senior Justice Department official told reporters yesterday at a hastily convened news conference held on the condition that the speakers not be identified by name.

"The government here is reacting very quickly to the Supreme Court's decisions," the Justice Department official added.

Very quickly, indeed. Contempt for the rule of law seems to be a reflex with this administration: it fires from the spinal cord without wasting any time making a pass through the brain.

Posted by zeynep at 01:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Truth in Advertising

I've always wondered about the military recruiters. How do they feel when a kid they've promised a college education and some cash on the side dies fighting an aggressive war based on lies? I thought the miked-up recruiters was the most interesting part of Michael Moore's film: their slick, practiced hooks sinking into confused, cornered youngsters. I can certainly understand how many felt like they needed to go out there and defend their country after September 11. I can understand how hard it must be for them to understand that their leaders were interested mainly in extending U.S. domination, which, let along fight terrorism, increases the risks from terrorism.

But now? After all of what's happenned? After Fallujah and Abu Ghraib? How do you recruit?

Mostly the same as always, it seems, according to a story in today's Washington Post. What has changed is that now many parents try to block the military recruiters efforts:

Poor and patriotic regions like this one are the lifeblood of America's volunteer military. Kids join as soon as they leave high school, for the college money, the job training, the opportunities so scarce at home. They join because they're proud of their country and they want to help. But during the past three years, they've been seeing more combat and less college. Every reserve unit in this area has been called to the Middle East at least once. Two active duty soldiers died, one with young kids, the other a kid himself. Then came Abu Ghraib and the photos that disgusted the world. Now, pride comes mixed with anger and growing doubts about the war.

"It's the parents holding me back," Broadwater says. When he calls, they hang up the phone, refuse to put their children on the line, tell him off. They try to talk their sons and daughters out of joining, and, more often now, they succeed.

Broadwater pushes the numbers hard: Serve one weekend a month for six years and earn thousands in college money, bonuses and pay. He tells the mothers, "If the Lord's going to take you, he'll take you sitting right there in your chair." They remind him that an Iraqi bomb took Pvt. Brandon L. Davis, 20, this spring. The parts of his body that could be identified were buried near his home in Cumberland, Md., and the rest, weeks later, in Arlington. It was a mortar attack that took Sgt. George A. Mitchell of Antioch, W.Va., a soldier's soldier who used to take his toddlers to church on Sundays so his wife could get some sleep.

There is also a very illuminating exchange where an administrator, who knew one of the kids killed, tries to stop the recruiter:

A week ago, Broadwater was at another college when an administrator tried to run him off. She knew Davis, the dead soldier from Cumberland, and she told Broadwater that she'd tear down his recruiting posters. Broadwater lost his temper. "He died for your right for complain!" he shouted at her.

This "they died for your freedom" is one of the main myths of holding up the pro-war ideological superstructure: somehow, the imperial stance is merged with domestic freedoms even though historical evidence is that there is an inverse correlation between them. It's hard to be both an empire and a republic, as Mark Twain observed more than a century ago.

It seems hard for the left to take this issue head-on because of many reasons. First, it raises immediate flak and ire. It's a very important pillar; its defense is proportionally vigorous. Second, it's just hard to say that so many deaths were caused by manipulative, imperial planners. It seems easier to accept a death in service of a noble cause.

Yet, what do we get by not confronting the truth? Many more deaths in vain -- deaths not in service of the causes that these youngster were led to believe they would be serving. Where is the honor in that?

Naomi Klein has an article about the "Mother of All Anti-War Forces," the mothers of dead soldiers.

Upon hearing the news, his mother, Rose Gentle, immediately blamed the government of Tony Blair, saying that, "My son was just a bit of meat to them, just a number . . . This is not our war, my son has died in their war over oil."

...

At Patrick McCaffrey's military funeral last week, Paul Harris, chaplain of the 579th Engineer Battalion, informed the mourners that, "What Patrick was doing was good and right and noble . . . There are thousands, no, millions, of Iraqis who are grateful for his sacrifice."

Nadia McCaffrey knows better and is insisting on carrying her son's own feelings of deep disappointment from beyond the grave. "He was so ashamed by the prisoner-abuse scandal," Ms. McCaffrey told The Independent. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there." Freed from the military censors who prevent soldiers from speaking their minds when they are alive, Lila Lipscomb has also shared her son's doubts about his work in Iraq. In Fahrenheit 9/11 she reads from a letter Michael Pederson mailed home. "What in the world is wrong with George, trying to be like his dad, Bush. He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama."

So, what are we tell mothers of future dead soldiers? We were afraid to be seen as less than supporting of the troops so we will let them be sent to kill and get killed in an immoral occupation?

I am not saying that it was not hard to voice these truths, especially before all the evidence became widely available and before the body bags and bodies missing parts started streaming back home. It is partly a question of confidence in your analysis: it's harder to stand firm and face the flak if you don't have confidence in your understanding of the world and your powers of prediction. The anti-war movement before the invasion might have been sizeable but what analysis that did exist was mostly weak, superficial, inconsistent and full of holes -- with some notable exceptions. It was right but it wasn't on strong ground.

Posted by zeynep at 12:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 07, 2004

An actual journalist! Someone take a picture!

Continuing on the issue for foreign fighters, Nir Rosen, who has spent a good part of last year in Iraq, has an informative guest commentary on Juan Cole's blog. He also had a recent piece in the New Yorker which was a rare example of actual journalism about Iraq.

Posted by zeynep at 11:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 06, 2004

The Resistance: It's the Saddam Loyalists! It's the Foreigners! It's the Martians!

Just yesterday I was wondering why there were almost no mention of "foreign fighters" among the huge numbers of Iraqis detained or killed by the U.S. occupation troops, something you'd expect if they were indeed as ubiquitous among the resistance as the administration claims. Now we have a number: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." Apparently, there are only 90 non-Iraqis in custody:

The numbers represent one of the most precise measurements to date of the composition of the insurgency and suggest that some Bush administration officials have overstated the role of foreign holy warriors, or jihadists, from other Arab states.

Posted by zeynep at 06:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Bush-Edwards-Kerry-Cheney Want More U.S. Troops in Iraq; Most Americans and Most Iraqis Don't

Saddam Hussein's regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.

Iraq has continued to seek nuclear weapons and develop its arsenal in defiance of the collective will of the international community, as expressed through the United Nations Security Council. It is violating the terms of the 1991 cease-fire that ended the Gulf War and as many as 16 Security Council resolutions, including 11 resolutions concerning Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

By ignoring these resolutions, Saddam Hussein is undermining the credibility of the United Nations, openly violating international law, and making a mockery of the very idea of collective action that is so important to the United States and its allies.

We cannot allow Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons in violation of his own commitments, our commitments, and the world's commitments.

This resolution will send a clear message to Iraq and the world: America is united in its determination to eliminate forever the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Fifty-four percent of those polled said it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, compared with 41 percent who expressed that sentiment in early June.

Most respondents to the poll, 55 percent, also said they don't believe the war has made the United States safer from terrorism

Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger, according to a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.... Those answers were given before the current showdowns in Fallujah and Najaf between U.S. troops and guerrilla fighters.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that 40 percent of respondents thought U.S. troops should be withdrawn to avoid further casualties, even if it meant civil order would not be restored. A Gallup poll in early May found that 29 percent wanted to withdraw all troops, while an additional 18 percent wanted to withdraw some. Twenty-five percent wanted to send more.

And, unfortunately, Nader also urged Kerry to pick the pro-war, pro-Patriot-act Edwards as his VP candidate:

Dear Senator Kerry:

I want to urge you to select Senator John Edwards as your vice presidential candidate. He has already gone through a primary campaign and has his rhythm and oratory (the two Americas speech) all well honed. After a slow start, Senator Edwards closed fast and has won praise from the media. As you know, Presidential candidates reach a tiny fraction of voters directly. The vast majority of voters can only be reached by the mass media.

There is another reason for choosing Senator Edwards. One of the pillars (the other two being civil rights and civil liberties) of our democracy – the civil justice system – is under severe attack by the corporate supremacists who wish to deny wrongfully injured or defrauded people from having their full day in court or even a partial day in court. Senator Edwards can stand up for the millions of Americans who suffer these harms and costs every year.

Sincerely,

Posted by zeynep at 04:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Another Day, Another Bombing

Another house was bombed in Fallujah. The local police captain says it was a residential house. AP shamefully reports that "U.S. airstrikes have frequently targeted safehouses used by members belonging to the network of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" when there is simply no evidence that any of the targets were indeed safehouses.

Most of the rest of story is also about Zarqawi's purported deeds. When presented in this light, even if it is later revealed that it was just a house with a family living in it, as it usually is, it all looks like a regrattable mistake.

There's your liberal media for you.

It would appear much different if it was reported accurately based on what we, and AP for that matter, actually know: that this is the umpteenth house hit with massive bombs from afar; that in no case was there any evidence before or after the bombing that there were foreign terrorists or Zarqawi associates living in the pulverized house; that in each case the neighbors, local police and hospitals, and any media that actually bothered to go to the scene, such as Al Jazeera, reported that items in the rubble showed that it was a regular house and crushed bodies of women and children had been dug up.

Posted by zeynep at 02:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

What are you doing here?

L.A. Times has a great story about "joint" U.S.-Iraqi patrols. And it's a start illustration of why Kerry's proposals for increasing the troops are absolutely horrible. The presence of American troops is the biggest part of the problem and more American troops will simply mean more resentment, anger and targets.

First, American soldiers and Iraqi police play a fun game of red-light-green-light:

The squad of U.S. soldiers waited impatiently to embark on a joint foot patrol with Iraqi police last week through the streets of this hostile city.

Military commanders hoped the sight of Americans and Iraqis walking side by side would symbolize the start of the transfer of control over security back to Iraqis.

The Iraqis didn't see it that way. Loath to be seen marching through their hometown with heavily armed Americans, none of them showed up.

"Is this a joint patrol, or what?" Capt. Chris Solinsky, the patrol leader, said into his shortwave radio. "Where are the Iraqis?"

Ten minutes later, eight unhappy-looking police officers joined the U.S. squad and reluctantly began the patrol.

"Great," Solinsky said dryly. "Sovereignty is bringing us together."

After that, it was a game of red-light-green-light, with the Iraqis staying at least 20 feet away from the U.S. soldiers. When the Americans stopped to allow the Iraqis to catch up, the Iraqis would stop too.

Then we have those wonderful house-raids, to be blamed on Iraqis when they go sour as usual:

The Americans organized a raid with about 80 soldiers and four Bradley fighting vehicles. Three Iraqi police officers were ordered to participate.

When soldiers arrived at the first house, they broke down the front door, handcuffed bleary-eyed residents and ordered them at gunpoint into the front yard for questioning.

"OK, just tell them what we're doing here," a U.S. soldier told one of the Iraqi policemen, who was also serving as interpreter.

The policeman — wearing a black ski mask to hide his identify — paused for a moment, and then asked the soldier, "What are you doing here?"

"Searching for foreign fighters!" the exasperated soldier shot back.

An hour later, more than 15 homes had been searched and no foreigners were found.

"It looks like we've got some bad intelligence here," Capt. Ty Johnson, leader of the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, radioed his commanders back at the U.S. base. "I suggest we finish up and leave. We're going to end up pissing the town off and making these people into insurgents."
Once the raid turned sour, some finger-pointing began. Iraqis characterized the raid as U.S.-led. The police chief said he had learned about the details only a few hours earlier.

When the searches came up dry, Johnson said it was the Iraqis who were in charge.

"This was their information," he said. "They are the ones really leading this."

This description of a house-raid says much about the nature U.S. military strategy in Iraq. Who decided that house-raids by an occupying army would ever be productive for any conceivable military purpose? It's clear that these "foreign fighters" are largely a myth, an ogre created by the U.S. spin machine, to try to explain away the anger Iraqis feel towards the occupation by blaming it all on some evil outsiders.

You know a military is in trouble when it starts acting on its own spin and knocking down people's doors in the middle of the night looking for these foreign fighters. (I don't even remember news accounts of any foreign fighters ever being caught. If they were so ubiquitous, you'd expect more than a few to show up here and there.)

Let me be clear: someone is carrying out large-scale terrorist bombings against Iraqi people, such as the Ashura and Basra bombings. It's quite possible this is the work of non-Iraqi islamic terrorists, personified by Zarqawi. That is a real issue that the Iraqi people will have to deal with -- and as of yet, it's unclear if the ending the occupation would also deprive those elements of the environment that allows them to survive. In other words, the ending of the occupation is a necessary but not necessarily sufficient condition of neutralizing this problem.

What is clear is that the presence of the occupation is a large part of the problem. Iraq's unoccupied future may not be a rose garden, emerging from decades-long totalitarian regime, multiple wars and horrific sanctions could hardly ever be. That broken country deserves the chance to try.

Posted by zeynep at 01:12 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 04, 2004

Declaration of Independence

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

Hanoi, September 2, 1945.
Opening paragraphs of Ho Chi Min's speech "Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam."

Posted by zeynep at 10:09 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

It's Official: Only $366 Million of the $18.6 Billion Has Been Actually Spent

For the first time, we have an official number on how much of the $18.6 billion Congress allocated for reconstruction of Iraq has been actually spent.

It's only $366 million.

While that number is close to the lowest estimate I published here, I must admit I'm still shocked. I was a bit skeptical of the low-end estimates. It turns out the real number is lower than what I was willing to countenance:

Iraqi, Not U.S., Cash Spent on Rebuilding:

The U.S. government has spent 2 percent of an $18.4 billion aid package that Congress approved last year after the Bush administration called for a quick infusion of cash into Iraq to finance reconstruction, according to figures released Friday by the White House.

The U.S.-led occupation authorities were much quicker to channel Iraq's own money, expending or earmarking nearly all of $20 billion in a special development fund fed by the country's oil sales, a congressional investigator said.

Only $366 million of the $18.4 billion U.S. aid package had been spent as of June 22, the White House budget office told Congress in a report that offers the first detailed accounting of the massive reconstruction package.

Thus far, according to the report, nothing from the package has been spent on construction, health care, sanitation and water projects. More money has been spent on administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy and governance.

I suppose I misunderestimated how corrupt and callous this bunch can be.

And, as I have been pointing out for a while, the CPA has spent ::drumrolls:: almost all of Iraq's own money, turning almost nothing over to the incoming government:

Christoff [Director of international affairs and trade at the General Accounting Office] said in a telephone interview on Saturday that all but $900 million of the fund had been spent or allocated by the time the United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government last Monday.

What a great set up. The administration has 138,000 troops while Iraq has a barely functioning police. Iraq has very little money while Negroponte will have unspent billions to dispense.

P.S. I think "misunderestimate" is perfectly good coinage. I believe it is a (verb) meaning to underestimate a person, an occurence or an entity due to misunderstanding their nature, habits or capacity.

Posted by zeynep at 01:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 02, 2004

Another excuse bites the dust in the generic AIDS drugs "controversy"

One more excuse in the malevolent edifice withholding AIDS drugs from poor countries is knocked down: generic three-in-one AIDS drugs work just as well as their pricey patented cousins. A clinical trial in Cameroon was just completed, virtually resurrecting 60 patients on the verge of death with two pills a day, 33 cents per pill.

Normally, it is sufficient to show that a generic is chemically equivalent to the brand-name version in order for the generic to gain approval. But not in this case because, as you all know, we are very concerned with the health and well-being of the 40 million people still living with HIV in countries. Cheap AIDS pill as good as pricey brands:

Lack of scientific evidence about the clinical effectiveness of such generic fixed-dose combinations has until now caused some international AIDS donors to refuse to fund their use.

...

Washington has barred groups receiving U.S. government funds from buying them [combined generics], insisting only drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration be used.

U.S. officials and Western pharmaceutical executives argue health providers are taking a risk by using medicines which have not passed the rigorous standards of the U.S. drugs watchdog.

There was a flurry around this issue last month because there were some problems with the bioequivalency documentation provided by the Indian generic drug-maker CIPLA. The headlines and the tenor of the stories were very much out-of-proportion with the facts. The problem was relatively simple: a laboratory hired by CIPLA had some missing documentation. The two drugs pulled off the list are expected to be restored as soon as a new lab can redo the testing:

WHO Nixes 2 Approved HIV Drugs

WHO did not find any problems during its original inspection of the company, but another laboratory carrying out what are known as bioequivalency tests for Cipla could not provide the required documentation.

"When Cipla presented the information it was all absolutely perfect — everything squared," Bagozzi said. "That sufficed for us to believe that everything had been done properly and there was no quality problem. (The drugs) seemed to be effective and fine."

It was only when the WHO checked the testing laboratory that the problem emerged, she said.

The health agency has asked Cipla to resubmit its documentation to get the drugs back on the approved list. If the laboratory used by Cipla then meets WHO's requirements, the medicines will be accepted again.

Cipla has told WHO that it is contracting a new laboratory and conducting new bioequivalency tests.

But even today’s Reuters story reports that incident as if it were an occurrence that actually pertained to the efficacy of the drugs rather than poor filing practices in one laboratory:

Worries about the quality of Indian medicines were fuelled last month when the WHO removed two Cipla products -- though not Triomune -- from its prequalification list because they had not been proven to be equivalent to the original products.

Note the “they had not been proven to be equivalent” phrase, which is blatantly misleading.

In any case, the latest study takes out the last vestiges from the generics aren’t as good as the brands excuse.

The great advantage of these “fixed-dose pills” is that they combine three anti-retrovirals into one pill. You cannot do that with non-generics because, well, they are owned by separate companies. How could they be forced to do something that might benefit all patients everywhere such as combining their pills -- and divvying up the profits amongst themselves afterwards? Unthinkable.

Along the way, the gushing of concern caused some trip-ups and tangling of the stories. The previous reason we could not provide drugs was that Africans could not follow the complicated therapy regimen:

Some doctors, politicians and pharmaceutical executives have argued that it is unsafe to send millions of doses of antiretroviral drugs to Africa, for fear that incomplete pill-taking will speed the mutation of drug-resistant strains that could spread around the world.

For Africa, the issue is particularly touchy because it is tinged with racism. In 2001, for example there was an outcry when the director of the United States Agency for International Development said that AIDS drugs "wouldn't work" in Africa because many Africans don't use clocks and "don't know what Western time is."

Well, that claim turned out to be utterly false as as soon as someone tested it:

Africans Outdo Americans in Following AIDS Therapy

Contradicting long-held prejudices that have clouded the campaign to bring AIDS drugs to millions of people in Africa, evidence is emerging that AIDS patients there are better at following their pill regimens than Americans are.

It turned out that Africans were much better in compliance than Americans, taking their drugs 90 percent of the time whereas the “average figure in the United States is 70 percent, and it is worse among subgroups like the homeless and drug abusers.”

As soon as the “drug regimen too complicated for Africans” argument was proven to be false the “combination generics aren’t proven to be safe argument” was adopted, without any note of how the latter “concerns” utterly contradicted the former “concerns” since fixed dose pills greatly reduce the complexity of the regimen. You’d expect someone to be concerned about compliance to be very enthusiastic about these simpler fixed-dose combination pills.

Of course, compliance is an important issue with AIDS-drugs, as with many other classes of drugs such as antibiotics, because what doesn’t kill the pathogen makes them stronger, which causes drug-resistance. Half-hearted compliance is the equivalent of creating an obstacle course to weed out the weakest pathogens who then regroup and attack en masse without their weakling relatives to drag them down. You find yourself playing against an NBA squad instead of the neighborhood team.

With about 10 percent of new HIV infections in Europe turning out to be resistant to at least one of the drugs, this is a real issue. It’s clear that fixed-dose pills should be the standard of care -- although one does need to also have access to the drugs in an uncombined state because atypical combinations can be necessary for different patients.

But, there I go babbling again. I meant to say that the obscene profit margins for pharmaceutical companies and huge salaries for their fat-cat executives, with some crumbs channeled appropriately into the political process, should be the first, last and intermediate priority.

Posted by zeynep at 03:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 01, 2004

Consumer Friendly Stun Guns: Think Outside the Semi-Automatic

You really couldn't make this stuff up:

Wall Street-darling Taser International, maker of "nonlethal weapons" (that have been shown on at least 40 occasions to contribute to death), said recently it is in talks with electronics chain Sharper Image, among other retailers, to sell "consumer-friendly" stun guns in the U.S. and Canada. For those of us not near a Sharper Image, Taser also plans to sell a "consumer-friendly" version of its 50,000-volt weapon on its Web site -- just a shock and click away.

Read it and, uhm, [weep | laugh | buy TASR on the Nasdaq | dig a well in your backyard.]

Posted by zeynep at 06:15 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

"Thumping the Bible with one hand and shredding the tax code with the other"

Something that has always puzzled me: how did the Republicans manage to become the party of the "common folk"? Not to say that the Democrats are but the Republicans certainly aren't. When was cultural conservatism enlisted in the army of imperialism and corporate conquest? Also, while we're at it, whatever happened to the populist, anti-corporate, culturally conservative movements of the nineteenth century?

Thomas Frank, who writes neat books like the Conquest of Cool, has come out with What's Wrong With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America addressing this very issue. There was an interview with Frank in Salon which had a compelling description what the the hard-rights managed to accomplish over the past three decades:

The result has been an entire region of the country dominated by an energized, rejuvenated Republican Party that represents the material interests of the powerful and the cultural obsessions of the powerless, that thumps the Bible with one hand and shreds the tax code with the other.

Barbara Ehrenreich also addresses the same issue in her NY Times op-ed “Dude, Where’s That Elite.” The good news is Ehrenreich will be a guest op-ed writer for the NY Times for a month. Better news is she replaces Thomas Friedman, the insufferable imperialism-apologist who thinks he can appoint himself spokesperson for Arabs, Chinese, Indians and, everyone else, for that matter. The downside is that Friedman is on a book leave: brace yourself for another well-written, witty, unbearably arrogant celebration of imperialism, consumerism and corporate domination.

The divergence of the long-term economic interests and the pertinent cultural preferences of working classes in this country is the sociological story of the past half century, with very profound political consequences both here and abroad. I say long-term because I believe we may be underestimating how much the non-elite benefits from living in the country on top of the food chain in the global economy. It may well be that the pro-imperialist stance of the strata that form the Republican base may not as deluded --and against their own self-interest-- as the left would like to believe, at least in the short-term. It is, however, deluded in the long-term because to these masters of greed and callousness, yesterday’s base is today’s losers. In any case, the current trajectory of that leadership is going to sink us all soon enough. In some sense the deepest betrayal of self-interest is among the imperial and corporate elite who are desparately trying to ruin their children's and their grandchildren's lives.

Just take one issue: just as environmental destruction reaches a critical level, global capitalism faces an oversupply of capital and goods that must be invested and that must be consumed. However, one cannot be solved without making the other much worse. Ford and GM might be happy if a billion more people want cars but the environment simply could not handle such an increase in emissions.

This is a collision course as dire as the world has ever seen. I suspect whether or not gay people have the right to marry will seem rather unimportant to the fiery Christian extremists when, say, a city or two gets submerged due to global warming. Then again, I guess some of them are looking forward to that.

Posted by zeynep at 02:37 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack