Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib? (washingtonpost.com)
The Wash Post Article referred to in the previous blog post....
washingtonpost.com
Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, January 5, 2005; Page A17
During the past eight months there have been many news cycles, many front-page stories, many events. There have been elections. There have been hurricanes and tidal waves. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of things, eight months is not a very long time. In most of the world, something that happened eight months ago is considered "recent." In Washington, however, it seems that eight months ago is considered "ancient." How else to explain the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the post of attorney general of the United States?
Or, more to the point: How else to explain the widespread assumption that Gonzales -- who commissioned the "torture memo" of August 2002, following a meeting in his office -- will be decisively confirmed? After all, eight months ago, much of the country -- and much of the Republican Party -- was gripped by horror and embarrassment after the publication of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those photographs haven't gone away: As I write this, I need only click on my computer's Internet Explorer icon and there is Lynndie England, grinning and giving a thumbs-up behind a pile of naked men.
If the pictures haven't gone away, the value system that led to Abu Ghraib hasn't gone away either. Last month -- really recently -- lawsuits filed by American human rights groups forced the government to release thousands of pages of documents showing that the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base long preceded the Abu Ghraib photographs, and that abuse has continued since then too. U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have, according to the administration's own records and my colleagues' reporting, used beatings, suffocation, sleep deprivation, electric shocks and dogs during interrogations. They probably still do.
Although many people bear some responsibility for these abuses, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is among those who bear the most responsibility. It was Gonzales who led the administration's internal discussion of what qualified as torture. It was Gonzales who advised the president that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people captured in Afghanistan. It was Gonzales who helped craft some of the administration's worst domestic decisions, including the indefinite detention, without access to lawyers, of U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.
By nominating Gonzales to his Cabinet, the president has demonstrated not only that he is undisturbed by these aberrations, but that he still doesn't understand the nature of the international conflict which he says he is fighting. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its fancy weapons systems but also to prove to the Islamic world that democratic values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The Cold War ended because Eastern Europeans were clamoring to join the West; the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us. They will not do so if our system promotes people who support legal arguments for human rights abuse.
The president's opponents -- Democrats, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- are lining up to oppose Gonzales. But there are Republicans who ought to understand the deeper issues at stake as well. I am thinking of Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, who was the moving force behind the recent passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act. I am also thinking of Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who has been an eloquent spokesman on behalf of the victims of religious persecution around the world. Other influential critics of international human rights abuses include Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, whose presence in Kiev last month had an enormous, uplifting impact on Ukrainian human rights demonstrators; Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has given his time to promote human rights even in obscure, unfashionable places such as Kazakhstan and Belarus; Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who has called for linking of trade agreements to human rights; and Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a member of the Judiciary Committee (which will pose questions to Gonzales) and a politician who can speak knowledgeably about human rights issues in Russia, China and the Middle East.
And those are only a few senators. In fact, anyone who has ever wanted the United States to play a role in promoting and supporting democracy and human rights around the world -- and this includes a wide swath of the conservative movement -- ought to oppose the appointment of Alberto Gonzales, if only on the grounds that he is associated with bad legal advice that has damaged our ability to do so. Just because the president can't remember how embarrassed we all were eight months ago doesn't mean the rest of Washington, and especially the rest of the president's party, need be gripped by amnesia as well.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Dynamist Blog: Torture Hearings
Dynamist Blog: Torture Hearings
As the reader might discern I'm not fan of this post except in the way that is seems to show how Republican Supporters are seemingly uniformlycursed in their ability to want the truth and outrage to be voiced when there's the slightest possibility dems will make repubs look bad.
As the reader might discern I'm not fan of this post except in the way that is seems to show how Republican Supporters are seemingly uniformlycursed in their ability to want the truth and outrage to be voiced when there's the slightest possibility dems will make repubs look bad.
:::Mo(nu)ments:::: Divorcing in Israel
:::Mo(nu)ments:::: Divorcing in Israel
No real point with this post, just thought it was an interesting topic covering customs in a terrorist nation.
No real point with this post, just thought it was an interesting topic covering customs in a terrorist nation.
From the Oceans, Indiscriminate Devastation
ABC News: Tsunami Survivors Worry Psychiatrists
ABC News: Tsunami Survivors Worry Psychiatrists
I need to read this article, I suppose. I know it is meant to be a serious article about a serious calamity. However, my first relation based on the headline is: "Oh gadzooks!, if Psychiatrists are worried, we must all be in deep kimchee."
I need to read this article, I suppose. I know it is meant to be a serious article about a serious calamity. However, my first relation based on the headline is: "Oh gadzooks!, if Psychiatrists are worried, we must all be in deep kimchee."
God's Wrath!
AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth
Today has been busy with taking care of personal and business matters. I'm just taking a moment to checking the blogosphere, and here this is. I think it's my manic mood that makes me, after reading this, want to laugh hysterically or cry.
Today has been busy with taking care of personal and business matters. I'm just taking a moment to checking the blogosphere, and here this is. I think it's my manic mood that makes me, after reading this, want to laugh hysterically or cry.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Asylum Seeker's Death Sparks Outrage
Asylum Seeker's Death Sparks Outrage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-na-haitian2jan02,1,40535.story?coll=la-health-medicine
THE NATION
Asylum Seeker's Death Sparks Outrage
Haitian community says the case of a pastor who died in immigration officials' custody, his medicines confiscated, is emblematic.
By John-Thor Dahlburg
Times Staff Writer
January 2, 2005
MIAMI — When the Rev. Joseph Dantica flew here from Haiti, his family said, he was seeking a momentary respite from the strife and violence convulsing his native land. Instead, the 81-year-old Baptist clergyman died in federal custody, separated from his family and medicine that he was carrying to treat his ailments.
The death of the pastor, who was detained at Miami International Airport after requesting temporary asylum, has provoked lasting anger and outrage that have rippled far beyond the Haitian American community. Dantica was a longtime spiritual leader and frequent visitor to the United States who had a valid entry visa and family members in this country.
"To let this man who came with such hopes die is really, really, really aggravating to the community. It has been the subject of questions, expressions of anger, disappointment and helplessness," said Marleine Bastien, founder and executive director of Haitian Women of Miami Inc., an advocacy group.
Dantica died in a Miami hospital Nov. 3 while in Department of Homeland Security custody. The pathos of a frail and aged man dying apart from his family, plus the fact that his niece, Edwidge Danticat, is a prominent Haitian American author, have kept this case in the spotlight.
"The way my uncle was treated was so emblematic of the way Haitian asylum seekers are treated here. Their stories are not believed, they are immediately detained, sometimes for years, and the majority are deported," Danticat said. (Her family name is spelled differently, she explained, because of an error made on her father's birth certificate.)
Danticat, 35, is the author of the novel "Breath, Eyes, Memory" that was a selection in Oprah Winfrey's book club. She is calling for an investigation by U.S. authorities into the death of the man who reared her in Haiti for eight years until she could join her parents in Brooklyn, where her immigrant father worked as a taxi driver. The writer has the support of Walter Mosley, author of the "Easy Rawlins" novels based in postwar Los Angeles, and film producer and director Jonathan Demme.
Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, a Miami Democrat, has also asked the Bush administration to look into the circumstances surrounding the pastor's death and bring criminal charges if warranted. If Dantica had kept quiet and not told immigration officials that he might overstay his visa, Meek noted, he could have entered this country freely, then registered an asylum claim by telephone at his leisure.
Instead, "he wanted to be truthful with us, and his truthfulness became his demise," the congressman said. In general, Meek said, "Haitians are treated unlike any other nationality that comes through Miami International Airport, in my opinion. They are at the bottom of the pole."
To date, the response from the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division has been a four-paragraph statement reporting that an autopsy showed Dantica's death was caused by pancreatitis, a "preexisting and fatal condition."
There is "no connection" between the rapid deterioration in Dantica's health and his detention after he arrived Oct. 29 in Miami, the statement said. Spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez in Customs Enforcement's Miami office declined to elaborate on Dantica's case, but said it was wrong to maintain that Haitians seeking to enter the United States were treated more harshly than people from other countries.
"Our enforcement operations do not target one particular race, nationality or ethnicity over any other," Gonzalez said. "The laws are applied evenly across the board."
Dantica was pastor of the Church of the Redeemer in the lawless Bel-Air district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. Dantica fled to the United States with his 55-year-old son, Maxo, after the church was pillaged and their lives threatened by an armed gang.
On Oct. 24, the church had been used by U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police who engaged in a running gun battle with gang members in the streets outside. Survivors reportedly told Dantica that 15 gang members had been killed, and threatened to behead him if he didn't hand over money to bury them. The minister and his son went into hiding, then departed for Miami.
Dantica, who spoke through a voice box after surgical removal of his larynx, suffered from high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate. When detained along with his son by U.S. officials, the minister was carrying prescription and herbal remedies. The drugs were confiscated, said Danticat, who spoke by phone with her uncle after he was taken to the Krome Detention Center west of Miami.
While awaiting an immigration hearing there, her uncle began vomiting and passed out, she said. He was taken to a hospital where family members were not permitted to see him and died the next day.
"I think there is a strong connection with the way he was treated and the fact he died," his niece said. "They took his medicine and when he was in crisis, they didn't attend to him."
Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said that because of Dantica's age and valid visa, U.S. officials had the option of quickly releasing him into the custody of family members. Instead, she said in an op ed piece published last month by the Miami Herald, they accused the minister of faking his illness, and he died alone, chained to a hospital bed.
"At every turn, Haitians are discriminated against," Little said in an interview. In a report soon to be made public, her Miami-based group will allege that in some parts of South Florida, Haitians seem to have been "disproportionately targeted" in sweeps for illegal immigrants conducted as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "Operation End Game."
Haitians illegally in the country, who may number 100,000, also have not been granted "temporary protected status," despite the widespread disorder in their homeland after the February departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and despite the destruction caused in the autumn by Hurricane Jeanne, which killed 3,000 people.
In April 2003, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said U.S. diplomats had noticed an increase in Pakistanis, Palestinians and other third-country nationals using Haiti as a staging area to enter this country. Little said that claim was groundless and had been used to justify a crackdown on Haitians who want to immigrate.
Danticat, a naturalized citizen who lives in Miami, said her uncle had been bewildered and ashamed to find himself behind bars. She said she hoped that an investigation into his death would lead to more humane treatment for asylum applicants.
"They could have let us see him; they could have let Maxo see him," she said. "But they let him die alone. It's shameful."
The day after his father's death, Maxo Dantica was released by U.S. officials and told that he could remain in this country for at least a year.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/medicine/la-na-haitian2jan02,1,40535.story?coll=la-health-medicine
THE NATION
Asylum Seeker's Death Sparks Outrage
Haitian community says the case of a pastor who died in immigration officials' custody, his medicines confiscated, is emblematic.
By John-Thor Dahlburg
Times Staff Writer
January 2, 2005
MIAMI — When the Rev. Joseph Dantica flew here from Haiti, his family said, he was seeking a momentary respite from the strife and violence convulsing his native land. Instead, the 81-year-old Baptist clergyman died in federal custody, separated from his family and medicine that he was carrying to treat his ailments.
The death of the pastor, who was detained at Miami International Airport after requesting temporary asylum, has provoked lasting anger and outrage that have rippled far beyond the Haitian American community. Dantica was a longtime spiritual leader and frequent visitor to the United States who had a valid entry visa and family members in this country.
"To let this man who came with such hopes die is really, really, really aggravating to the community. It has been the subject of questions, expressions of anger, disappointment and helplessness," said Marleine Bastien, founder and executive director of Haitian Women of Miami Inc., an advocacy group.
Dantica died in a Miami hospital Nov. 3 while in Department of Homeland Security custody. The pathos of a frail and aged man dying apart from his family, plus the fact that his niece, Edwidge Danticat, is a prominent Haitian American author, have kept this case in the spotlight.
"The way my uncle was treated was so emblematic of the way Haitian asylum seekers are treated here. Their stories are not believed, they are immediately detained, sometimes for years, and the majority are deported," Danticat said. (Her family name is spelled differently, she explained, because of an error made on her father's birth certificate.)
Danticat, 35, is the author of the novel "Breath, Eyes, Memory" that was a selection in Oprah Winfrey's book club. She is calling for an investigation by U.S. authorities into the death of the man who reared her in Haiti for eight years until she could join her parents in Brooklyn, where her immigrant father worked as a taxi driver. The writer has the support of Walter Mosley, author of the "Easy Rawlins" novels based in postwar Los Angeles, and film producer and director Jonathan Demme.
Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, a Miami Democrat, has also asked the Bush administration to look into the circumstances surrounding the pastor's death and bring criminal charges if warranted. If Dantica had kept quiet and not told immigration officials that he might overstay his visa, Meek noted, he could have entered this country freely, then registered an asylum claim by telephone at his leisure.
Instead, "he wanted to be truthful with us, and his truthfulness became his demise," the congressman said. In general, Meek said, "Haitians are treated unlike any other nationality that comes through Miami International Airport, in my opinion. They are at the bottom of the pole."
To date, the response from the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division has been a four-paragraph statement reporting that an autopsy showed Dantica's death was caused by pancreatitis, a "preexisting and fatal condition."
There is "no connection" between the rapid deterioration in Dantica's health and his detention after he arrived Oct. 29 in Miami, the statement said. Spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez in Customs Enforcement's Miami office declined to elaborate on Dantica's case, but said it was wrong to maintain that Haitians seeking to enter the United States were treated more harshly than people from other countries.
"Our enforcement operations do not target one particular race, nationality or ethnicity over any other," Gonzalez said. "The laws are applied evenly across the board."
Dantica was pastor of the Church of the Redeemer in the lawless Bel-Air district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. Dantica fled to the United States with his 55-year-old son, Maxo, after the church was pillaged and their lives threatened by an armed gang.
On Oct. 24, the church had been used by U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police who engaged in a running gun battle with gang members in the streets outside. Survivors reportedly told Dantica that 15 gang members had been killed, and threatened to behead him if he didn't hand over money to bury them. The minister and his son went into hiding, then departed for Miami.
Dantica, who spoke through a voice box after surgical removal of his larynx, suffered from high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate. When detained along with his son by U.S. officials, the minister was carrying prescription and herbal remedies. The drugs were confiscated, said Danticat, who spoke by phone with her uncle after he was taken to the Krome Detention Center west of Miami.
While awaiting an immigration hearing there, her uncle began vomiting and passed out, she said. He was taken to a hospital where family members were not permitted to see him and died the next day.
"I think there is a strong connection with the way he was treated and the fact he died," his niece said. "They took his medicine and when he was in crisis, they didn't attend to him."
Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said that because of Dantica's age and valid visa, U.S. officials had the option of quickly releasing him into the custody of family members. Instead, she said in an op ed piece published last month by the Miami Herald, they accused the minister of faking his illness, and he died alone, chained to a hospital bed.
"At every turn, Haitians are discriminated against," Little said in an interview. In a report soon to be made public, her Miami-based group will allege that in some parts of South Florida, Haitians seem to have been "disproportionately targeted" in sweeps for illegal immigrants conducted as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "Operation End Game."
Haitians illegally in the country, who may number 100,000, also have not been granted "temporary protected status," despite the widespread disorder in their homeland after the February departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and despite the destruction caused in the autumn by Hurricane Jeanne, which killed 3,000 people.
In April 2003, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said U.S. diplomats had noticed an increase in Pakistanis, Palestinians and other third-country nationals using Haiti as a staging area to enter this country. Little said that claim was groundless and had been used to justify a crackdown on Haitians who want to immigrate.
Danticat, a naturalized citizen who lives in Miami, said her uncle had been bewildered and ashamed to find himself behind bars. She said she hoped that an investigation into his death would lead to more humane treatment for asylum applicants.
"They could have let us see him; they could have let Maxo see him," she said. "But they let him die alone. It's shameful."
The day after his father's death, Maxo Dantica was released by U.S. officials and told that he could remain in this country for at least a year.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Monday, January 03, 2005
NEWSWEEK EXCLUSIVE: Kerry on Post-Election: 'I'm Not Going to Lick My Wounds or Hide Under a Rock or Disappear. I'm Going to Learn.'
This is outrageous. Not one mention of voting fraud! Not one mention of the outrageous behavior of the mass media.
Not one mention about why there were still $ in his campaign coffers.
NEWSWEEK EXCLUSIVE: Kerry on Post-Election: 'I'm Not Going to Lick My Wounds or Hide Under a Rock or Disappear. I'm Going to Learn.'
Not one mention about why there were still $ in his campaign coffers.
NEWSWEEK EXCLUSIVE: Kerry on Post-Election: 'I'm Not Going to Lick My Wounds or Hide Under a Rock or Disappear. I'm Going to Learn.'
Creating Fear
Last weekend I was at a movie with my family on Christmas day. I saw something for the first time that goes along with so many other elements of daily life that are actually creating fear for us. One of the pre-movie announcements was: Look around you and find the 2 exits nearest you. In the event of an emergency, make your way to an exit as quickly as possible. It took me a moment to realize I wasn't on an airplane, but in a movie theater.
The only positive thing I can think of here is that these things give us an opportunity to shift how we feel in the moment - how we want our movie (or airplane or whatever) experience to go for us. I did this for myself last Saturday - spent a moment picturing the lovely, entertaining afternoon I was going to have in the movie theater. That's exactly the experience I had, but I wonder how many people in that theater added for themselves just another tiny layer of "I'm not safe anywhere" to their sense of how it is to live in this world.
The only positive thing I can think of here is that these things give us an opportunity to shift how we feel in the moment - how we want our movie (or airplane or whatever) experience to go for us. I did this for myself last Saturday - spent a moment picturing the lovely, entertaining afternoon I was going to have in the movie theater. That's exactly the experience I had, but I wonder how many people in that theater added for themselves just another tiny layer of "I'm not safe anywhere" to their sense of how it is to live in this world.
Home / Headlines / The 9/11 Catastrophe - A Dereliction of Duty by Our Commander-in-Chief - Media Monitors Network (MMN)
Home / Headlines / The 9/11 Catastrophe - A Dereliction of Duty by Our Commander-in-Chief - Media Monitors Network (MMN): "net
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Mobile editionEmail and toolsLetter to editorFAQsContact usLogin/registerSite Map"
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Yahoo! News - Senator Says Lifetime Terror Detentions 'Bad Idea'
Yahoo! News - Senator Says Lifetime Terror Detentions 'Bad Idea'
Now that 2005 has arrived, it's good to see how our leaders are going to point out bad ideas when they come up. Wonder if they'll take on any other bad ideas, like mass murder by US forces in Iraq. I won't hold my breath.
Now that 2005 has arrived, it's good to see how our leaders are going to point out bad ideas when they come up. Wonder if they'll take on any other bad ideas, like mass murder by US forces in Iraq. I won't hold my breath.
Salon.com News | Top homeland contractors had gov't run-ins
Salon.com News | Top homeland contractors had gov't run-ins
Top homeland contractors had gov't run-ins
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Matt Kelley
Jan. 1, 2005 | Washington -- The largest Homeland Security Department contractors include two companies which paid millions to settle charges they defrauded the Pentagon, one firm which paid a foreign corruption fine and a business accused of botching a computer system for veterans hospitals, records show.
About a quarter of the $2.5 billion awarded to the 50 largest Homeland Security contractors came under no-bid contracts, agency records show. That's lower, however, than the 44 percent of Pentagon contracts given under "other than full and open competition."
The rest of the money paid to the top contractors -- a bit more than $2 billion -- was for contracts awarded through competition, the records show. Some of the nation's largest federal contractors have won the new business of protecting America from terrorists, including many with a recent history of legal run-ins with the government, the records show.
The two companies with the most business -- nearly $700 million between them -- were Boeing Co. and Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a partnership of defense giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Those companies have paid more than $250 million in the past three years to settle charges of improprieties with their Pentagon contracts. Homeland Security audits also have accused the two companies of overcharging, in Boeing's case by $49 million.
Homeland Security officials gave Congress a list of the top contractors through July and their competition status amid criticism of the agency's management and oversight of its money. The criticism has ranged from overcharges to exorbitant employee awards that came at taxpayers expense.
The department was created by pulling together 22 federal agencies with 180,000 employees and dramatically increased funding -- up to $33 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Officials blame some of the problems on growing pains.
"The department recognizes it has many challenges, and from the day it stood up has taken positive steps to build and improve the department's contract management system," spokesman Larry Orluskie said Thursday.
Analyst James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation said some agencies within the department, such as the Coast Guard, have more serious contract oversight problems than others.
"In some cases, you have programs which have been created out of thin air, and in other cases, you have people managing programs which are far larger than anything they've done in the past," Carafano said.
While the list of big contractors is dominated by well-known, large companies, there are a few lesser known players who won large contracts.
For instance, Chenega Technology Services Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, got a $500 million no-bid contract to maintain and repair screening equipment at ports and border crossings under a legislative provision written by Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Homeland Security's biggest contractor this year, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, is upgrading and expanding the Coast Guard's fleet of ships, boats, airplanes and helicopters.
Clark Kent Ervin, the department's inspector general, said in a report that hiring IGCS to install new engines in HH-65 helicopters would take longer and cost more than if the Coast Guard did the work itself.
The original IGCS proposal for the project was a month late and included "$123 million worth of goods and services that the Coast Guard did not ask for and could not afford," Ervin's report said.
The Coast Guard defended the contract, telling Ervin it believes the program is properly managed. IGCS spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell-Jones said the company agreed.
Another report from Ervin said Boeing -- Homeland Security's second-largest contractor last year -- overcharged the department $49 million on a massive contract to install and maintain bomb detection and other screening equipment at U.S. airports.
Boeing spokesman Fernando Vivanco denied any overcharging and said the company met the contract's tight schedule.
"Nobody thought it could be done, and we did it," he said.
Homeland Security's critics also questioned a $229 million contract to technology giant BearingPoint. The Department of Veterans Affairs abandoned a BearingPoint computer system for a Florida hospital last fall because it failed a nine-month testing process. The Justice Department and VA are investigating.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., wrote to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge in October questioning whether BearingPoint should be trusted with new business.
"It seems to be it's in the best interest of the taxpayers that BearingPoint be suspended until we know the facts," Nelson said in November.
BearingPoint spokesman John Schneidawind defended the company's Homeland Security contract.
"We followed the bidding process and won the project fairly," Schneidawind said Thursday.
The company that supplies airport bomb-detection equipment, InVision Technologies Inc., agreed Dec. 6 to pay an $800,000 fine for alleged improper payments by distributors to foreign officials. The agreement cleared the way for General Electric to buy InVision.
InVision was the fourth-largest Homeland Security contractor between October 2003 and July, getting about $178 million, department records show.
GE spokesman Jeffrey DeMarrais said GE has agreed to make sure its InVision subsidiary complies with anti-corruption laws.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Top homeland contractors had gov't run-ins
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Matt Kelley
Jan. 1, 2005 | Washington -- The largest Homeland Security Department contractors include two companies which paid millions to settle charges they defrauded the Pentagon, one firm which paid a foreign corruption fine and a business accused of botching a computer system for veterans hospitals, records show.
About a quarter of the $2.5 billion awarded to the 50 largest Homeland Security contractors came under no-bid contracts, agency records show. That's lower, however, than the 44 percent of Pentagon contracts given under "other than full and open competition."
The rest of the money paid to the top contractors -- a bit more than $2 billion -- was for contracts awarded through competition, the records show. Some of the nation's largest federal contractors have won the new business of protecting America from terrorists, including many with a recent history of legal run-ins with the government, the records show.
The two companies with the most business -- nearly $700 million between them -- were Boeing Co. and Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a partnership of defense giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Those companies have paid more than $250 million in the past three years to settle charges of improprieties with their Pentagon contracts. Homeland Security audits also have accused the two companies of overcharging, in Boeing's case by $49 million.
Homeland Security officials gave Congress a list of the top contractors through July and their competition status amid criticism of the agency's management and oversight of its money. The criticism has ranged from overcharges to exorbitant employee awards that came at taxpayers expense.
The department was created by pulling together 22 federal agencies with 180,000 employees and dramatically increased funding -- up to $33 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Officials blame some of the problems on growing pains.
"The department recognizes it has many challenges, and from the day it stood up has taken positive steps to build and improve the department's contract management system," spokesman Larry Orluskie said Thursday.
Analyst James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation said some agencies within the department, such as the Coast Guard, have more serious contract oversight problems than others.
"In some cases, you have programs which have been created out of thin air, and in other cases, you have people managing programs which are far larger than anything they've done in the past," Carafano said.
While the list of big contractors is dominated by well-known, large companies, there are a few lesser known players who won large contracts.
For instance, Chenega Technology Services Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, got a $500 million no-bid contract to maintain and repair screening equipment at ports and border crossings under a legislative provision written by Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Homeland Security's biggest contractor this year, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, is upgrading and expanding the Coast Guard's fleet of ships, boats, airplanes and helicopters.
Clark Kent Ervin, the department's inspector general, said in a report that hiring IGCS to install new engines in HH-65 helicopters would take longer and cost more than if the Coast Guard did the work itself.
The original IGCS proposal for the project was a month late and included "$123 million worth of goods and services that the Coast Guard did not ask for and could not afford," Ervin's report said.
The Coast Guard defended the contract, telling Ervin it believes the program is properly managed. IGCS spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell-Jones said the company agreed.
Another report from Ervin said Boeing -- Homeland Security's second-largest contractor last year -- overcharged the department $49 million on a massive contract to install and maintain bomb detection and other screening equipment at U.S. airports.
Boeing spokesman Fernando Vivanco denied any overcharging and said the company met the contract's tight schedule.
"Nobody thought it could be done, and we did it," he said.
Homeland Security's critics also questioned a $229 million contract to technology giant BearingPoint. The Department of Veterans Affairs abandoned a BearingPoint computer system for a Florida hospital last fall because it failed a nine-month testing process. The Justice Department and VA are investigating.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., wrote to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge in October questioning whether BearingPoint should be trusted with new business.
"It seems to be it's in the best interest of the taxpayers that BearingPoint be suspended until we know the facts," Nelson said in November.
BearingPoint spokesman John Schneidawind defended the company's Homeland Security contract.
"We followed the bidding process and won the project fairly," Schneidawind said Thursday.
The company that supplies airport bomb-detection equipment, InVision Technologies Inc., agreed Dec. 6 to pay an $800,000 fine for alleged improper payments by distributors to foreign officials. The agreement cleared the way for General Electric to buy InVision.
InVision was the fourth-largest Homeland Security contractor between October 2003 and July, getting about $178 million, department records show.
GE spokesman Jeffrey DeMarrais said GE has agreed to make sure its InVision subsidiary complies with anti-corruption laws.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Tsunami Exposes the Nihilism of Environmentalism by Eric Englund
I'm not posting this to support it's message, nor am I sure that I agree with the position that it is criticising.
Tsunami Exposes the Nihilism of Environmentalism by Eric Englund
Tsunami Exposes the Nihilism of Environmentalism by Eric Englund
The New York Times > National > Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantanamo
The New York Times > National > Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guant�namo
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 1, 2005
Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot.
But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.
After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.
The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated.
Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.
While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.
Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner.
"We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner."
His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way."
Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists.
In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guantánamo: the November report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States government that the procedures at Guantánamo were "tantamount to torture"; memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guantánamo officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there.
The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.
Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.
In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word "meow."
The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation.
Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo, said in a statement that officials would not comment on accusations about the treatment of any individual detainee including Mr. Kahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan.
"We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees."
Colonel Sumpter said that the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo had produced useful intelligence "based on trust and not out of fear or duress."
The intelligence officials who spoke with The Times said that the interrogation personnel and their assigned prisoners were divided into five groups. Four were geographically based - one for Saudi Arabia, one for the Gulf States, another for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the last for Asia, Europe and the Americas. The fifth, termed "special projects," included Mr. Kahtani.
There was a high confidence among military intelligence officials that Mr. Kahtani was a dangerous operative of Al Qaeda. The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in its June report that he was denied entry into the United States on Aug. 4, 2001, at the Orlando airport, the same day that Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, was there and most likely intended to meet him.
The officials who spoke about the detainees' treatment said, however, that very few of the other prisoners had much value. "So much of the questioning was about Afghanistan," one intelligence official said. "Most of it was dated. Information about facilitators and recruiters was useful only in style, not in facts."
The clearest indication that senior commanders at Guantánamo were aware of and supported what was occurring may be in some F.B.I. memorandums. One, dated May 10, 2003, and written by an unidentified agent, describes a sharp exchange between bureau officials and General Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of the intelligence operations at Guantánamo then.
"Both sides agreed that the bureau has its way of doing things and the D.O.D. has their marching orders from SecDef," the memorandum said, using abbreviations for the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense. "Although the two techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do."
The frustration caused by Mr. Kahtani's refusal to cooperate set off a high-level review of allowable interrogation techniques, according to documents released earlier by the Pentagon. After officials at Guantánamo asked for more leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.
None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.
Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.
In order to carry on the charade that he was not at Guantánamo, the military arranged it so Mr. Kahtani was not visited by the Red Cross on a few of its regular visits, creating a window of several months, said a person who dealt with him at Guantánamo. Officials at the Washington office of the Red Cross, which makes periodic visits to each of the Guantánamo detainees, said they would not discuss their meetings with any prisoners as part of their agreement with the United States government.
Two interrogators confirmed several of the complaints in the Red Cross report, including the notion that interrogators were able to obtain prisoners' medical records easily, which human rights groups say could discourage inmates from seeking medical care. The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations.
"They were supposed to help us break them down," one said.
The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guantánamo.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 1, 2005
Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot.
But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.
After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.
The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated.
Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment.
While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.
Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner.
"We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner."
His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way."
Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists.
In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guantánamo: the November report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States government that the procedures at Guantánamo were "tantamount to torture"; memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guantánamo officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there.
The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours. One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.
Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap performances by Eminem.
In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word "meow."
The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation.
Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo, said in a statement that officials would not comment on accusations about the treatment of any individual detainee including Mr. Kahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan.
"We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees."
Colonel Sumpter said that the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo had produced useful intelligence "based on trust and not out of fear or duress."
The intelligence officials who spoke with The Times said that the interrogation personnel and their assigned prisoners were divided into five groups. Four were geographically based - one for Saudi Arabia, one for the Gulf States, another for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the last for Asia, Europe and the Americas. The fifth, termed "special projects," included Mr. Kahtani.
There was a high confidence among military intelligence officials that Mr. Kahtani was a dangerous operative of Al Qaeda. The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in its June report that he was denied entry into the United States on Aug. 4, 2001, at the Orlando airport, the same day that Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, was there and most likely intended to meet him.
The officials who spoke about the detainees' treatment said, however, that very few of the other prisoners had much value. "So much of the questioning was about Afghanistan," one intelligence official said. "Most of it was dated. Information about facilitators and recruiters was useful only in style, not in facts."
The clearest indication that senior commanders at Guantánamo were aware of and supported what was occurring may be in some F.B.I. memorandums. One, dated May 10, 2003, and written by an unidentified agent, describes a sharp exchange between bureau officials and General Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was in charge of the intelligence operations at Guantánamo then.
"Both sides agreed that the bureau has its way of doing things and the D.O.D. has their marching orders from SecDef," the memorandum said, using abbreviations for the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense. "Although the two techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do."
The frustration caused by Mr. Kahtani's refusal to cooperate set off a high-level review of allowable interrogation techniques, according to documents released earlier by the Pentagon. After officials at Guantánamo asked for more leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.
None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.
Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.
In order to carry on the charade that he was not at Guantánamo, the military arranged it so Mr. Kahtani was not visited by the Red Cross on a few of its regular visits, creating a window of several months, said a person who dealt with him at Guantánamo. Officials at the Washington office of the Red Cross, which makes periodic visits to each of the Guantánamo detainees, said they would not discuss their meetings with any prisoners as part of their agreement with the United States government.
Two interrogators confirmed several of the complaints in the Red Cross report, including the notion that interrogators were able to obtain prisoners' medical records easily, which human rights groups say could discourage inmates from seeking medical care. The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations.
"They were supposed to help us break them down," one said.
The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected operations at Guantánamo.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Raw Print | Westboro Baptist Tsunami Statement
Oh wow! I didn't realise, when I first read the internet headline about this, just how replusive it is.....
Kansas, what a sick Red State!
Raw Print | Westboro Baptist Tsunami Statement
Kansas, what a sick Red State!
Raw Print | Westboro Baptist Tsunami Statement
ZNet |Asia | Genocide By Geology
I feel like piece comes on a little strong, but it's is worth blogging....
ZNet |Asia | Genocide By Geology
ZNet |Asia | Genocide By Geology
Terror groups call voting un-Islamic
Oh wow, layer upon layer here...
Where does one start.... with the fact that the US is not really a democracy
link, with the idea that many right wingers agree with the "terroists" on the issue of gay "marriage"?
Terror groups call voting un-Islamic
Where does one start.... with the fact that the US is not really a democracy
link, with the idea that many right wingers agree with the "terroists" on the issue of gay "marriage"?
Terror groups call voting un-Islamic
CODE PINK GIVES $600,000 TO THE 'OTHER SIDE' IN FALLUJAH (TREASON ALERT!)
One engaging part of the internet and blogs is the ready access to various aspects of an issue.
I'm not completely aware of the "freepers" (I think that's what the detractors call them) at www.freerepublic.com, but this is an exhibit of their odius thought.
Reminds me of Chomsky's assertion ‘Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoistic and chauvinist attitudes. They’re designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.’ as bloged at
link
CODE PINK GIVES $600,000 TO THE 'OTHER SIDE' IN FALLUJAH (TREASON ALERT!)
I'm not completely aware of the "freepers" (I think that's what the detractors call them) at www.freerepublic.com, but this is an exhibit of their odius thought.
Reminds me of Chomsky's assertion ‘Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoistic and chauvinist attitudes. They’re designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.’ as bloged at
link
CODE PINK GIVES $600,000 TO THE 'OTHER SIDE' IN FALLUJAH (TREASON ALERT!)
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Ends of the World as We Know Them
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Ends of the World as We Know Them
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 1, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By JARED DIAMOND
os Angeles — NEW Year's weekend traditionally is a time for us to reflect, and to make resolutions based on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?
Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.
When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.
For instance, in the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter Island three centuries ago, environmental problems were dominant, and climate change, enemies and trade were insignificant; however, the latter three factors played big roles in the disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland. Let's consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of causes: the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian settlements on the Pitcairn Islands.
Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.
Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?
A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.
Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.
What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve.
Whereas Maya societies were undone by problems of their own making, Polynesian societies on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean were undone largely by other people's mistakes. Pitcairn, the uninhabited island settled in 1790 by the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers, had actually been populated by Polynesians 800 years earlier. That society, which left behind temple platforms, stone and shell tools and huge garbage piles of fish and bird and turtle bones as evidence of its existence, survived for several centuries and then vanished. Why?
In many respects, Pitcairn and Henderson are tropical paradises, rich in some food sources and essential raw materials. Pitcairn is home to Southeast Polynesia's largest quarry of stone suited for making adzes, while Henderson has the region's largest breeding seabird colony and its only nesting beach for sea turtles. Yet the islanders depended on imports from Mangareva Island, hundreds of miles away, for canoes, crops, livestock and oyster shells for making tools.
Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, their Mangarevan trading partner collapsed for reasons similar to those underlying the Maya decline: deforestation, erosion and warfare. Deprived of essential imports in a Polynesian equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis, the Pitcairn and Henderson societies declined until everybody had died or fled.
The Maya and the Henderson and Pitcairn Islanders are not alone, of course. Over the centuries, many other societies have declined, collapsed or died out. Famous victims include the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who abandoned their cities in the 12th century because of environmental problems and climate change, and the Greenland Norse, who disappeared in the 15th century because of all five interacting factors on the checklist. There were also the ancient Fertile Crescent societies, the Khmer at Angkor Wat, the Moche society of Peru - the list goes on.
But before we let ourselves get depressed, we should also remember that there is another long list of cultures that have managed to prosper for lengthy periods of time. Societies in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands and Central and Northwest Europe, for example, have all found ways to sustain themselves. What separates the lost cultures from those that survived? Why did the Maya fail and the shogun succeed?
Half of the answer involves environmental differences: geography deals worse cards to some societies than to others. Many of the societies that collapsed had the misfortune to occupy dry, cold or otherwise fragile environments, while many of the long-term survivors enjoyed more robust and fertile surroundings. But it's not the case that a congenial environment guarantees success: some societies (like the Maya) managed to ruin lush environments, while other societies - like the Incas, the Inuit, Icelanders and desert Australian Aborigines - have managed to carry on in some of the earth's most daunting environments.
The other half of the answer involves differences in a society's responses to problems. Ninth-century New Guinea Highland villagers, 16th-century German landowners, and the Tokugawa shoguns of 17th-century Japan all recognized the deforestation spreading around them and solved the problem, either by developing scientific reforestation (Japan and Germany) or by transplanting tree seedlings (New Guinea). Conversely, the Maya, Mangarevans and Easter Islanders failed to address their forestry problems and so collapsed.
Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country faced its own crisis of deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the peace and prosperity following the Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph that ended 150 years of civil war. The subsequent explosion of Japan's population and economy set off rampant logging for construction of palaces and cities, and for fuel and fertilizer.
The shoguns responded with both negative and positive measures. They reduced wood consumption by turning to light-timbered construction, to fuel-efficient stoves and heaters, and to coal as a source of energy. At the same time, they increased wood production by developing and carefully managing plantation forests. Both the shoguns and the Japanese peasants took a long-term view: the former expected to pass on their power to their children, and the latter expected to pass on their land. In addition, Japan's isolation at the time made it obvious that the country would have to depend on its own resources and couldn't meet its needs by pillaging other countries. Today, despite having the highest human population density of any large developed country, Japan is more than 70 percent forested.
There is a similar story from Iceland. When the island was first settled by the Norse around 870, its light volcanic soils presented colonists with unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to cut down trees and stock sheep as if they were still in Norway, with its robust soils. Significant erosion ensued, carrying half of Iceland's topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders became the poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other strict controls, and establishing an entire government department charged with landscape management. Today, Iceland boasts the sixth-highest per-capita income in the world.
What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today.
Other lessons involve failures of group decision-making. There are many reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.
History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.
Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.
In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal problems. For instance, the Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been unable to insulate itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a simple reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off Dutch know that they will drown along with everybody else, which is precisely what happened during the floods of 1953.
The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense. The medieval Greenland Norse lacked such a willingness: they continued to view themselves as transplanted Norwegian pastoralists, and to despise the Inuit as pagan hunters, even after Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had grown too cold for a pastoral existence. They died off as a result, leaving Greenland to the Inuit. On the other hand, the British in the 1950's faced up to the need for a painful reappraisal of their former status as rulers of a world empire set apart from Europe. They are now finding a different avenue to wealth and power, as part of a united Europe.
In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.
Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.
But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.
A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect American lives.
Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don't figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don't need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our problems of population and the environment.
I also draw hope from a unique advantage that we enjoy. Unlike any previous society in history, our global society today is the first with the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of societies remote from us in space and in time. When the Maya and Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no historians or archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed chronicle of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we choose to use it?
Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," is the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 1, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By JARED DIAMOND
os Angeles — NEW Year's weekend traditionally is a time for us to reflect, and to make resolutions based on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?
Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.
When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.
For instance, in the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter Island three centuries ago, environmental problems were dominant, and climate change, enemies and trade were insignificant; however, the latter three factors played big roles in the disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland. Let's consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of causes: the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian settlements on the Pitcairn Islands.
Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.
Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?
A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.
Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.
What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve.
Whereas Maya societies were undone by problems of their own making, Polynesian societies on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean were undone largely by other people's mistakes. Pitcairn, the uninhabited island settled in 1790 by the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers, had actually been populated by Polynesians 800 years earlier. That society, which left behind temple platforms, stone and shell tools and huge garbage piles of fish and bird and turtle bones as evidence of its existence, survived for several centuries and then vanished. Why?
In many respects, Pitcairn and Henderson are tropical paradises, rich in some food sources and essential raw materials. Pitcairn is home to Southeast Polynesia's largest quarry of stone suited for making adzes, while Henderson has the region's largest breeding seabird colony and its only nesting beach for sea turtles. Yet the islanders depended on imports from Mangareva Island, hundreds of miles away, for canoes, crops, livestock and oyster shells for making tools.
Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, their Mangarevan trading partner collapsed for reasons similar to those underlying the Maya decline: deforestation, erosion and warfare. Deprived of essential imports in a Polynesian equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis, the Pitcairn and Henderson societies declined until everybody had died or fled.
The Maya and the Henderson and Pitcairn Islanders are not alone, of course. Over the centuries, many other societies have declined, collapsed or died out. Famous victims include the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who abandoned their cities in the 12th century because of environmental problems and climate change, and the Greenland Norse, who disappeared in the 15th century because of all five interacting factors on the checklist. There were also the ancient Fertile Crescent societies, the Khmer at Angkor Wat, the Moche society of Peru - the list goes on.
But before we let ourselves get depressed, we should also remember that there is another long list of cultures that have managed to prosper for lengthy periods of time. Societies in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands and Central and Northwest Europe, for example, have all found ways to sustain themselves. What separates the lost cultures from those that survived? Why did the Maya fail and the shogun succeed?
Half of the answer involves environmental differences: geography deals worse cards to some societies than to others. Many of the societies that collapsed had the misfortune to occupy dry, cold or otherwise fragile environments, while many of the long-term survivors enjoyed more robust and fertile surroundings. But it's not the case that a congenial environment guarantees success: some societies (like the Maya) managed to ruin lush environments, while other societies - like the Incas, the Inuit, Icelanders and desert Australian Aborigines - have managed to carry on in some of the earth's most daunting environments.
The other half of the answer involves differences in a society's responses to problems. Ninth-century New Guinea Highland villagers, 16th-century German landowners, and the Tokugawa shoguns of 17th-century Japan all recognized the deforestation spreading around them and solved the problem, either by developing scientific reforestation (Japan and Germany) or by transplanting tree seedlings (New Guinea). Conversely, the Maya, Mangarevans and Easter Islanders failed to address their forestry problems and so collapsed.
Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country faced its own crisis of deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the peace and prosperity following the Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph that ended 150 years of civil war. The subsequent explosion of Japan's population and economy set off rampant logging for construction of palaces and cities, and for fuel and fertilizer.
The shoguns responded with both negative and positive measures. They reduced wood consumption by turning to light-timbered construction, to fuel-efficient stoves and heaters, and to coal as a source of energy. At the same time, they increased wood production by developing and carefully managing plantation forests. Both the shoguns and the Japanese peasants took a long-term view: the former expected to pass on their power to their children, and the latter expected to pass on their land. In addition, Japan's isolation at the time made it obvious that the country would have to depend on its own resources and couldn't meet its needs by pillaging other countries. Today, despite having the highest human population density of any large developed country, Japan is more than 70 percent forested.
There is a similar story from Iceland. When the island was first settled by the Norse around 870, its light volcanic soils presented colonists with unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to cut down trees and stock sheep as if they were still in Norway, with its robust soils. Significant erosion ensued, carrying half of Iceland's topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders became the poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other strict controls, and establishing an entire government department charged with landscape management. Today, Iceland boasts the sixth-highest per-capita income in the world.
What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today.
Other lessons involve failures of group decision-making. There are many reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.
History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.
Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.
In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal problems. For instance, the Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been unable to insulate itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a simple reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off Dutch know that they will drown along with everybody else, which is precisely what happened during the floods of 1953.
The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense. The medieval Greenland Norse lacked such a willingness: they continued to view themselves as transplanted Norwegian pastoralists, and to despise the Inuit as pagan hunters, even after Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had grown too cold for a pastoral existence. They died off as a result, leaving Greenland to the Inuit. On the other hand, the British in the 1950's faced up to the need for a painful reappraisal of their former status as rulers of a world empire set apart from Europe. They are now finding a different avenue to wealth and power, as part of a united Europe.
In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.
Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.
But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.
A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect American lives.
Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don't figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don't need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our problems of population and the environment.
I also draw hope from a unique advantage that we enjoy. Unlike any previous society in history, our global society today is the first with the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of societies remote from us in space and in time. When the Maya and Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no historians or archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed chronicle of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we choose to use it?
Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," is the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Aljazeera.Net - Palestinians killed in Israeli army raids
Ok, a tirade on my part probably won't serve anyone's purpose. However, there's a part of me that has a stronger emotional response to this news story and the contant stream of others like it, that is more powerful that my reaction to the 150,000+ dead from the Tsunami.
Aljazeera.Net - Palestinians killed in Israeli army raids
Aljazeera.Net - Palestinians killed in Israeli army raids
Pakistani, Iraqi Beheaded for Drug Trafficking - from TBO.com
First post of 2005!
As anyone would notice, this blog is often a new article posting site rather than commentary. With each moment, with so many words produced mostly from a broadcasting or columnist's mandate to fill the scheduled release of material and from blogs and other ways that we now have to publish, I am mostly resigned to not adding more to the ocean of words, other than drawing attention to source materials, and hopefully bringing attention to the most fascinating analysis.
Moreover, seeing this report of state sanctioned beheading in Saudi Arabia seems to jump out at me. It seems necessary to take a sober look at the way our world twirls (think I should credit Meria Heller www.meria.net for the world twirls phrase), with it's ability to find ways back to the most dubious of approaches of society's attempts to enforce moral codes and punishments. Rather than reacting in horror, I would ask the reader to remember the French revolution or the hangings of the old American West.
Here's a web site somewhat randomly found by google about the history of beheading in Western Civilization:
link
I don't have a whole thought here, but I think it is interesting to consider that most of us experience knowledge of human death as we live our lives. When does one accept it as natural, or purposeful, or alternatively, as barbarism? It is our intellect and emotions, that make those designations. What's the truth behind it all? Is there any?
Pakistani, Iraqi Beheaded for Drug Trafficking - from TBO.com
As anyone would notice, this blog is often a new article posting site rather than commentary. With each moment, with so many words produced mostly from a broadcasting or columnist's mandate to fill the scheduled release of material and from blogs and other ways that we now have to publish, I am mostly resigned to not adding more to the ocean of words, other than drawing attention to source materials, and hopefully bringing attention to the most fascinating analysis.
Moreover, seeing this report of state sanctioned beheading in Saudi Arabia seems to jump out at me. It seems necessary to take a sober look at the way our world twirls (think I should credit Meria Heller www.meria.net for the world twirls phrase), with it's ability to find ways back to the most dubious of approaches of society's attempts to enforce moral codes and punishments. Rather than reacting in horror, I would ask the reader to remember the French revolution or the hangings of the old American West.
Here's a web site somewhat randomly found by google about the history of beheading in Western Civilization:
link
I don't have a whole thought here, but I think it is interesting to consider that most of us experience knowledge of human death as we live our lives. When does one accept it as natural, or purposeful, or alternatively, as barbarism? It is our intellect and emotions, that make those designations. What's the truth behind it all? Is there any?
Pakistani, Iraqi Beheaded for Drug Trafficking - from TBO.com
Friday, December 31, 2004
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 26, 2004 - January 01, 2005 Archives
Ayn Rand institute says US aid to disaster victims is wrong...
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 26, 2004 - January 01, 2005 Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 26, 2004 - January 01, 2005 Archives
Justice Expands 'Torture' Definition (washingtonpost.com)
Justice Expands 'Torture' Definition (washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
Justice Expands 'Torture' Definition
Earlier Policy Drew Criticism
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 31, 2004; Page A01
The Justice Department published a revised and expansive definition late yesterday of acts that constitute torture under domestic and international law, overtly repudiating one of the most criticized policy memorandums drafted during President Bush's first term.
In a statement published on the department's Web site, the head of its Office of Legal Counsel declares that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms" and goes on to reject a previous statement that only "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" constitute torture punishable by law.
That earlier definition of torture figured prominently in complaints by Democrats and human rights groups about White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who oversaw its creation and is Bush's nominee to become attorney general for the second term. The new memo's public release came one week before the start of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Gonzales's nomination.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin said in the new memo that torture may consist of acts that fall short of provoking excruciating and agonizing pain and thus may include mere physical suffering or lasting mental anguish. His opinion is meant, according to its language, to undermine any notion that those who conduct harmful interrogations may be exempt from prosecution.
This second effort by the Bush administration to parse the legal meaning of the word "torture" was provoked by the damaging political fallout from the disclosure this summer of the first memo, drafted in August 2002 and criticized by human rights lawyers and experts around the globe.
Many of the critics charged that the first memo -- which they said laid out a very narrow view of what behavior might constitute torture and was crafted to help interrogators at the CIA evade prosecution -- created the context for a record of persistent ill treatment by that agency and the U.S. military of detainees at prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and undisclosed locations.
"Clearly the release of this now is backfilling for Gonzales's confirmation hearing," said I. Michael Greenberger, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who now heads the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "These memos have been a tremendous source of embarrassment to both Gonzales and the administration."
Greenberger said that recent accounts of widespread abuse at U.S. detention facilities -- including disclosures that military interrogation practices were sharply criticized over the past two years by FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel in the field -- have given ammunition to those within the administration who favor adherence to international norms against torture.
"It could be that this is not just a cynical ploy but a real sign of change," Greenberger said.
One of the most controversial provisions of the earlier memorandum, signed by Levin's predecessor, Jay S. Bybee, was an assertion that the president's executive powers were sufficient to permit tolerance of torturous acts in extraordinary circumstances. The International Committee of the Red Cross had declared in response that the prohibition on torture, embodied in a global convention signed by the United States, has no exceptions.
But advocates of strict adherence to the convention previously lost interagency battles to hard-liners in the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the White House, who maintained that the president has expansive powers during the war on terrorism. The new memo pointedly sidesteps this issue, stating that the "consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture."
The memo, which states that it "supersedes the August 2002 memorandum in its entirety," also drops an attempt in the earlier version to rule that harmful acts not specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering might be legal, and to define "specific intent." Instead, it deliberately left the notion of "specific intent" undefined to avoid, Levin wrote, any notion that conduct amounting to torture might under some circumstances be considered legal.
The memo also explicitly states that "a defendant's motive (to protect national security, for example) is not relevant to the question" of his or her intent under the law.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, which has been critical of the Bush administration's legal opinions regarding the treatment of detainees, gave the memo a generally positive review and said its "definition of torture is not as tortured as it was."
But John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who helped draft the first memo while working in the legal counsel's office, said the new version "makes it harder to figure out how the torture statute applies to specific interrogation methods. It muddies the water. Our effort . . . was to interpret the statute clearly."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
Justice Expands 'Torture' Definition
Earlier Policy Drew Criticism
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 31, 2004; Page A01
The Justice Department published a revised and expansive definition late yesterday of acts that constitute torture under domestic and international law, overtly repudiating one of the most criticized policy memorandums drafted during President Bush's first term.
In a statement published on the department's Web site, the head of its Office of Legal Counsel declares that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms" and goes on to reject a previous statement that only "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" constitute torture punishable by law.
That earlier definition of torture figured prominently in complaints by Democrats and human rights groups about White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who oversaw its creation and is Bush's nominee to become attorney general for the second term. The new memo's public release came one week before the start of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Gonzales's nomination.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin said in the new memo that torture may consist of acts that fall short of provoking excruciating and agonizing pain and thus may include mere physical suffering or lasting mental anguish. His opinion is meant, according to its language, to undermine any notion that those who conduct harmful interrogations may be exempt from prosecution.
This second effort by the Bush administration to parse the legal meaning of the word "torture" was provoked by the damaging political fallout from the disclosure this summer of the first memo, drafted in August 2002 and criticized by human rights lawyers and experts around the globe.
Many of the critics charged that the first memo -- which they said laid out a very narrow view of what behavior might constitute torture and was crafted to help interrogators at the CIA evade prosecution -- created the context for a record of persistent ill treatment by that agency and the U.S. military of detainees at prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and undisclosed locations.
"Clearly the release of this now is backfilling for Gonzales's confirmation hearing," said I. Michael Greenberger, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who now heads the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "These memos have been a tremendous source of embarrassment to both Gonzales and the administration."
Greenberger said that recent accounts of widespread abuse at U.S. detention facilities -- including disclosures that military interrogation practices were sharply criticized over the past two years by FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel in the field -- have given ammunition to those within the administration who favor adherence to international norms against torture.
"It could be that this is not just a cynical ploy but a real sign of change," Greenberger said.
One of the most controversial provisions of the earlier memorandum, signed by Levin's predecessor, Jay S. Bybee, was an assertion that the president's executive powers were sufficient to permit tolerance of torturous acts in extraordinary circumstances. The International Committee of the Red Cross had declared in response that the prohibition on torture, embodied in a global convention signed by the United States, has no exceptions.
But advocates of strict adherence to the convention previously lost interagency battles to hard-liners in the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the White House, who maintained that the president has expansive powers during the war on terrorism. The new memo pointedly sidesteps this issue, stating that the "consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture."
The memo, which states that it "supersedes the August 2002 memorandum in its entirety," also drops an attempt in the earlier version to rule that harmful acts not specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering might be legal, and to define "specific intent." Instead, it deliberately left the notion of "specific intent" undefined to avoid, Levin wrote, any notion that conduct amounting to torture might under some circumstances be considered legal.
The memo also explicitly states that "a defendant's motive (to protect national security, for example) is not relevant to the question" of his or her intent under the law.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, which has been critical of the Bush administration's legal opinions regarding the treatment of detainees, gave the memo a generally positive review and said its "definition of torture is not as tortured as it was."
But John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who helped draft the first memo while working in the legal counsel's office, said the new version "makes it harder to figure out how the torture statute applies to specific interrogation methods. It muddies the water. Our effort . . . was to interpret the statute clearly."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Aljazeera.Net - Mosul election staff quit en masse
Aljazeera.Net - Mosul election staff quit en masse
Democracy is on the March!
Democracy is on the March!
The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial Observer: Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial Observer: Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 30, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
he most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated, sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the military.
To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.
This upheaval has been particularly vivid at the Pentagon, where the usual balance between civilian and military authority has been stood on its head. The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. The civilian bosses are supposed to provide coolheaded restraint.
Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of interrogation methods for Guantánamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could seem legal.
It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the Pentagon to review the Guantánamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.
That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.
If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of the City Bar Association in New York.
That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view. Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.
This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.
Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."
"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X. Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.' "
Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of engagement or military justice.
But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists. Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."
Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.
Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the civilian lawyers.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 30, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
he most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated, sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the military.
To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.
This upheaval has been particularly vivid at the Pentagon, where the usual balance between civilian and military authority has been stood on its head. The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. The civilian bosses are supposed to provide coolheaded restraint.
Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of interrogation methods for Guantánamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could seem legal.
It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the Pentagon to review the Guantánamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.
That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.
If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of the City Bar Association in New York.
That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view. Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.
This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.
Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."
"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X. Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.' "
Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of engagement or military justice.
But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists. Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."
Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.
Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the civilian lawyers.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish (washingtonpost.com)
GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish (washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish
Unlikely Voters Cast Lot With Bush
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A03
BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa.
Early on a pale blue morning, a horse-drawn buggy clop-clopped along a farmland stretch of Route 340. A lone little Chevy compact came toward it at a Sunday pace.
From an intersection, a black SUV the size of an Indian elephant barreled up to the buggy's back, passing with a quick jerk that nearly clipped the oncoming car -- and the horse's nose.
That's Pennsylvania's Amish country, where the 19th and 21st centuries coexist, commingle and collide on a regular basis. The Amish may hold fast to their plain ways, rejecting cars, indoor electricity, home phones and televisions. But contact with the outside world is unavoidable. Malls stand on land where corn used to grow, tourists run around the village streets, and even the old unspoken rule -- leave the Amish alone -- is gone, left in the dust of the presidential campaign, when the Republicans came calling for votes.
Yes, the Republicans, true to their vow to leave no vote unwooed, came to Lancaster County hoping to win over the famously reclusive Old Order Amish -- who shun most modern ways -- along with their slightly less-strict brethren, the Mennonites. Democrats laughed at the very idea. The Amish had no use for politics. Were the Republicans that desperate? But the GOP effort, underscored by President Bush's meeting with some Amish families in early July, did the trick.
"Yup, we voted this time," said an elder Old Order Amish man approached at his home-based quilt shop on Route 340. He had a beard that straggled down to his chest and bright blue eyes. His first name, he said, is Amos, but in keeping with the Amish edict against calling attention to oneself, he would not give his last name.
"I didn't vote for the last 30 years," he said, puffing on a pipe. "But Bush seemed to have our Christian principles."
Outside looking in, it makes sense that the Amish would pay little attention to national politics. They have their own schools (formal education for eight years), their own churches (or religious gatherings, at one another's homes) and their own rules. This has worked for them. The population of Amish and Mennonites, at more than 20,000 in Lancaster County, keeps growing.
But it seems the outside world, the "English" world, as the Amish call it, has been creeping in too closely for the plain people not to worry. In recent months, reports of child abuse in Amish country have made local papers and national news. The reality show "Amish in the City" has brought a slew of curiosity seekers asking all kinds of questions. (Do you take showers? Read newspapers? Ride buses? Yes, yes and yes.) And the plain people have daily worries as well. "We've been worrying about liquor and beer being sold in the grocery stores," said Sam, a gazebo maker and writer who said he would "get into trouble" if his last name was printed.
"We were down," Sam said, "and when the president visited, it cheered us right up. We got a firsthand look at him, and it really warmed our hearts."
In short, as Sam and half a dozen other Amish men explained (women were hard to find, and harder to talk to), Bush won votes with a time-honored campaign convention: He showed up. On July 9 his campaign bus rolled down Route 340, hoping to fire up the base in Republican Lancaster County. The Amish, watching the spectacle from the road, became part of it.
"We came out," Amos said. "We were about 70 people. One of his security said he wanted to meet us and invited us to meet with him across the road at Lapp's Electric."
"They knew we didn't like publicity," said Amos, smiling at the recollection. "So the president met with us all in an office at Lapp's. He shook everyone's hand -- even the littlest ones in their mother's arms -- and he told us all he hoped we would exercise our right and vote."
Did Bush ask them to vote for him?
"Nope," Amos said. "That's another thing we liked about him."
Not to mention, the 4,000 Republican volunteers who blanketed Lancaster County for months and visited the fairs and farm auctions in Amish country talking up the president's Christian values. That helped them think abortion might be outlawed, Sam said. Thinking of Bush's Christian values even helped with their questions about the carnage in Iraq.
And so, while Bush lost Pennsylvania by more than 120,000 votes, he nearly halved his losing margin from 2000. In large part, that was because of the GOP's push among rural voters. Here in Lancaster County, where the party set a goal of besting the Democrat by 70,000 votes (or about 10,000 more than in 2000), Bush ended up winning by 70,896. Several hundred of those votes came from men in suspenders and black suits and women in bonnets and wide-skirt black dresses. Republicans registered more than 300 new voters in each of three mostly Amish districts. In Leacock Township, the GOP nearly doubled its voter rolls, from 1,000 to 1,800, with all but a handful of the new voters being Amish or Mennonite.
Just as everyone predicted the plain folks would not vote, the postmortems all suggested the Amish vote was a fluke. Amos -- another Amos, who sells wooden toys and other Amish crafts at a roadside stand -- said that bothers him. He could see more plain people voting next time, he said, "for another candidate with good morals."
Sam, the carpenter-journalist, had read reports suggesting that the GOP manipulated the Amish. That did not sit well at all. "They didn't come here just recruiting the Amish," he said. "They were trying to get anybody to vote."
The Amish, in turn, voted with pure hearts, he said, asking for nothing in return.
Or almost nothing.
"We're trying to get tickets for the inauguration," he said. "Do you know how to go about getting those?"
-- Evelyn Nieves
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish
Unlikely Voters Cast Lot With Bush
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A03
BIRD-IN-HAND, Pa.
Early on a pale blue morning, a horse-drawn buggy clop-clopped along a farmland stretch of Route 340. A lone little Chevy compact came toward it at a Sunday pace.
From an intersection, a black SUV the size of an Indian elephant barreled up to the buggy's back, passing with a quick jerk that nearly clipped the oncoming car -- and the horse's nose.
That's Pennsylvania's Amish country, where the 19th and 21st centuries coexist, commingle and collide on a regular basis. The Amish may hold fast to their plain ways, rejecting cars, indoor electricity, home phones and televisions. But contact with the outside world is unavoidable. Malls stand on land where corn used to grow, tourists run around the village streets, and even the old unspoken rule -- leave the Amish alone -- is gone, left in the dust of the presidential campaign, when the Republicans came calling for votes.
Yes, the Republicans, true to their vow to leave no vote unwooed, came to Lancaster County hoping to win over the famously reclusive Old Order Amish -- who shun most modern ways -- along with their slightly less-strict brethren, the Mennonites. Democrats laughed at the very idea. The Amish had no use for politics. Were the Republicans that desperate? But the GOP effort, underscored by President Bush's meeting with some Amish families in early July, did the trick.
"Yup, we voted this time," said an elder Old Order Amish man approached at his home-based quilt shop on Route 340. He had a beard that straggled down to his chest and bright blue eyes. His first name, he said, is Amos, but in keeping with the Amish edict against calling attention to oneself, he would not give his last name.
"I didn't vote for the last 30 years," he said, puffing on a pipe. "But Bush seemed to have our Christian principles."
Outside looking in, it makes sense that the Amish would pay little attention to national politics. They have their own schools (formal education for eight years), their own churches (or religious gatherings, at one another's homes) and their own rules. This has worked for them. The population of Amish and Mennonites, at more than 20,000 in Lancaster County, keeps growing.
But it seems the outside world, the "English" world, as the Amish call it, has been creeping in too closely for the plain people not to worry. In recent months, reports of child abuse in Amish country have made local papers and national news. The reality show "Amish in the City" has brought a slew of curiosity seekers asking all kinds of questions. (Do you take showers? Read newspapers? Ride buses? Yes, yes and yes.) And the plain people have daily worries as well. "We've been worrying about liquor and beer being sold in the grocery stores," said Sam, a gazebo maker and writer who said he would "get into trouble" if his last name was printed.
"We were down," Sam said, "and when the president visited, it cheered us right up. We got a firsthand look at him, and it really warmed our hearts."
In short, as Sam and half a dozen other Amish men explained (women were hard to find, and harder to talk to), Bush won votes with a time-honored campaign convention: He showed up. On July 9 his campaign bus rolled down Route 340, hoping to fire up the base in Republican Lancaster County. The Amish, watching the spectacle from the road, became part of it.
"We came out," Amos said. "We were about 70 people. One of his security said he wanted to meet us and invited us to meet with him across the road at Lapp's Electric."
"They knew we didn't like publicity," said Amos, smiling at the recollection. "So the president met with us all in an office at Lapp's. He shook everyone's hand -- even the littlest ones in their mother's arms -- and he told us all he hoped we would exercise our right and vote."
Did Bush ask them to vote for him?
"Nope," Amos said. "That's another thing we liked about him."
Not to mention, the 4,000 Republican volunteers who blanketed Lancaster County for months and visited the fairs and farm auctions in Amish country talking up the president's Christian values. That helped them think abortion might be outlawed, Sam said. Thinking of Bush's Christian values even helped with their questions about the carnage in Iraq.
And so, while Bush lost Pennsylvania by more than 120,000 votes, he nearly halved his losing margin from 2000. In large part, that was because of the GOP's push among rural voters. Here in Lancaster County, where the party set a goal of besting the Democrat by 70,000 votes (or about 10,000 more than in 2000), Bush ended up winning by 70,896. Several hundred of those votes came from men in suspenders and black suits and women in bonnets and wide-skirt black dresses. Republicans registered more than 300 new voters in each of three mostly Amish districts. In Leacock Township, the GOP nearly doubled its voter rolls, from 1,000 to 1,800, with all but a handful of the new voters being Amish or Mennonite.
Just as everyone predicted the plain folks would not vote, the postmortems all suggested the Amish vote was a fluke. Amos -- another Amos, who sells wooden toys and other Amish crafts at a roadside stand -- said that bothers him. He could see more plain people voting next time, he said, "for another candidate with good morals."
Sam, the carpenter-journalist, had read reports suggesting that the GOP manipulated the Amish. That did not sit well at all. "They didn't come here just recruiting the Amish," he said. "They were trying to get anybody to vote."
The Amish, in turn, voted with pure hearts, he said, asking for nothing in return.
Or almost nothing.
"We're trying to get tickets for the inauguration," he said. "Do you know how to go about getting those?"
-- Evelyn Nieves
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 26, 2004 - January 01, 2005 Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 26, 2004 - January 01, 2005 Archives
washingtonpost.com
On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows
By Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01
In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.
But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.
In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.
Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.
"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. "They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery."
The ultimate test of the two campaigns is in the success of their efforts to increase turnout from 2000. Kerry and his allies increased the Democrat's vote by about 6.8 million votes; Bush increased his by nearly 10.5 million. In the key battleground of Ohio, Bush countered Kerry's gains in the metropolitan precincts by boosting his margin in exurban and rural counties from 57 to 60 percent, eking out a 118,457-vote victory.
A supposed strategic advantage for the Democrats -- massive support from well-endowed independent groups -- turned out to have an inherent flaw: The groups' legally required independence left them with a message out of harmony with the Kerry campaign.
A large part of Bush's advantage derived from being an incumbent who did not face a challenger from his party. He also benefited from the experience and continuity of a campaign hierarchy, based on a corporate model, that had essentially stayed intact since Bush's 1998 reelection race for Texas governor.
Take Office, Plan Campaign
When Bush moved into the Oval Office in 2001, planning for his presidential reelection campaign began almost immediately. Under the direction of Karl Rove, Bush's top White House adviser who served as a kind of chairman of the board, White House political director Kenneth B. Mehlman, the chief executive officer, pollster Matthew Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, the Bush political team developed a strategy for 2004, began investing in innovative techniques to target voters and prepared an early and cost-effective advertising plan. During this period, the Republican National Committee, where much of the planning was based, outspent its Democratic counterpart by $122 million.
In 2001, Dowd said that "we made some of the basic strategic assumptions about what we thought the election would look like."
One fundamental calculation was that 93 percent of the voting-age public was already committed or predisposed toward the Democratic or Republican candidate, leaving 7 percent undecided.
Another calculation was that throughout the Bush presidency, "most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd said. Those voters were unlikely to change their views before Election Day 2004.
That prompted Republicans to jettison their practice of investing 75 to 90 percent of campaign money on undecided voters. Instead, half the money went into motivating and mobilizing people already inclined to vote for Bush, but who were either unregistered or who often failed to vote -- "soft" Republicans.
"We systematically allocated all the main resources of the campaign to the twin goals of motivation and persuasion. The media, the voter targeting, the mail -- all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd said.
Republican officials said they put $50 million into "ground war" drives to register and turn out millions of new voters in 2001 and 2002, and an additional $125 million after that.
Meanwhile, Kerry, faced with a difficult primary campaign and infighting and turnover among his consultants, did not begin seriously to address the general election until after his Super Tuesday primary election victory in March, eight months before the November vote. By that time, the campaign was hamstrung by legal restrictions on any cooperation between the campaign and the independent 527 organizations running ads and mobilizing voters on Kerry's behalf.
527s' Ineffective Messages
The 527 groups, named after a section of the tax code and allowed by law to accept unlimited contributions, provided invaluable help in registering and turning out voters. America Coming Together put about $135 million into what became the largest get-out-the-vote program in the nation's history. But the 527s, fueled with money from billionaires such as George Soros, proved ineffective in helping Kerry deliver a consistent and timely message in his advertising.
Of all the money spent on television advertising for the Democratic nominee, Kerry's campaign controlled 62 percent, according to spending totals analyzed by The Washington Post. The rest was spent on ads whose content or placement could not be coordinated with the campaign. The Bush campaign controlled 83 percent of the money spent on its behalf, giving it far more control over when and how it advertised.
At two junctures, when Kerry was either out of funds or under pressure to conserve resources for the close of the campaign, the absence of an overall strategy had damaging consequences: in March 2004, just when the Bush campaign began its first anti-Kerry offensive; and in August 2004, when the Swift Boat Veterans commercials raised questions about Kerry's service in the Vietnam War.
The Democratic media 527s "didn't do what we wanted done," Kerry media adviser Tad Devine said. "We would have run ads about Kerry, we would have had answers to the attacks in kind, saying they were false, disproved by newspapers."
Harold Ickes, who ran the Media Fund, a 527 organization that raised about $59 million in support of Kerry, said the federal election law prohibiting communication with the Kerry campaign created insurmountable obstacles in crafting effective, accurate responses to anti-Kerry ads. Ickes said he regretted not responding to the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks, but at the time he thought they seemed "a matter so personal to Senator Kerry, so much within his knowledge. Who knew what the facts were?"
Early Research Is Like Yeast
The 2002 elections, along with the Kentucky and Mississippi gubernatorial contests the following year, became testing grounds for the Republican effort to mobilize supporters. Designed to get base voters to the polls, it became known as the "72 Hour Project," whose cost Republican officials refused to disclose but is estimated by sources to have been in the $200 million range.
Under Dowd's direction, the RNC began investing in extensive voter research. One of the most striking findings, according to Republican consultants, was the ineffectiveness of traditional phone banks and direct mail that targeted voters in overwhelmingly Republican precincts. The problem: Only 15 percent of all GOP voters lived in precincts that voted Republican by 65 percent or more. Worse, an even smaller percentage of "soft" Republicans, the 2004 target constituency, lived in such precincts.
The RNC decided to cast a wider net for voters. But to work, Dowd's motivation and mobilization strategy needed expensive, high-tech micro targeting to cherry-pick prospective Republicans who lived in majority Democratic neighborhoods.
Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic.
Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine "anger points" (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other "flags." Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message.
"You used to get a tape-recorded voice of Ronald Reagan telling you how important it was to vote. That was our get-out-the-vote effort," said Alex Gage, of TargetPoint. Now, he said, calls can be targeted to specific constituencies so that, for example, a "right to life voter" could get a call warning that "if you don't come out and vote, the number of abortions next year is going to go up. "
Dowd estimated that, in part through the work of TargetPoint and other research, the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to "quadruple the number" of Republican voters who could be targeted through direct mail, phone banks and knocking on doors.
Democrats had access to similar data files. But the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to make far better use of the data because they had the time and money to conduct repeated field tests in the 2002 and 2003 elections, to finance advanced research on meshing databases with polling information, and to clean up and revise databases that almost invariably contained errors and omissions.
"Very few people understand how much work it takes to get this technology to actually produce political results. We are one election cycle behind them in this area," said a Democrat who helped coordinate voter contact in the 2004 campaign.
The Bush campaign's early fundraising success made much of this possible. By March 2004, Bush had $110 million in the bank and virtually no debt. During this period, Kerry was forced to spend all his time and money in the Democratic primaries, a fight that cost him $36 million and that left him $5 million in debt.
"Nobody was giving a thought at all to the general election," said Kerry pollster Mark S. Mellman. Until that March, "it was: How do we survive this week?"
Bush Ads Undermine Kerry
Two days after Super Tuesday, the Bush campaign, anticipating Kerry would have no money to respond, began a $40 million, six-week televised assault designed to crush the Democratic nominee before he could get off the ground. "We had a financial advantage over them for four to six weeks. That's why we did what we did," Dowd said.
With a $177 million ad budget, the Bush campaign and its allies ran more than 101,000 anti-Kerry "attack" or negative ads, more than the combined total of "positive" and "contrast" ads, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, based on data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus ratings of media buying effectiveness.
Less than 5 percent of Kerry's ads were "attack" or negative, according to the Wisconsin advertising project, and the remaining 95 percent were positive or contrast ads.
During March and April, before the candidate had replenished his war chest to finance TV ads, Kerry strategists were convinced that Kerry needed a barrage of positive biographical ads describing him in a sympathetic light to counter the negative picture drawn by the Bush ads. But when the Democratic 527s began their ad campaign, they aired negative ads reflecting their intensely anti-Bush donor base.
By the time Kerry had raised enough money to begin his positive ad campaign two months later, the Bush "attack" ads had helped convert the ratio of Kerry's positive to negative ratings in battleground states. Kerry's positive ratings fell from 40 percent to 35 percent, and his negative ratings rose from 24 percent to 36 percent at the start of May, according to the National Annenberg Election Surveys.
The negative Bush barrage was followed in August by the Swift Boat Veterans ads, the first one airing on just four cable channels at a cost of $546,000. The Swift Boat Veterans eventually would raise and spend $28 million, but the first ad was exceptionally cost-effective: most voters learned about it through free coverage in mainstream media and talk radio.
An additional Republican television commercial that significantly affected the race, according to surveys, was a positive spot financed by a second GOP 527 group, Progress for America. It invested $17 million in "Ashley's Story," which featured Ashley Faulkner, 11, whose mother had been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, describing her meeting with Bush.
GOP Dollar Power
Overall, Kerry, the DNC and the Democratic 527s spent $344 million on ads, while Bush and the GOP counterparts spent about $289 million, much of which was disbursed in the final three months. Arguably, Republicans got more bang for their bucks.
The Bush campaign's early strategy decisions shaped GOP spending. Under the guidance of Rove, Dowd and Mehlman, the Bush campaign had financed early research into ways to communicate to center-right voters through nontraditional media.
The Bush campaign concluded that many of their voters did not trust the networks and the establishment press, and therefore did not trust messages transmitted through them.
Mehlman said that talk radio and cable television "are more credible" to potential Bush voters. Ultimately the Bush campaign invested an unprecedented $20 million in narrowly targeted advertising on cable and in radio, with a heavy emphasis on religious, talk and country and western stations, and such specialty outlets as golf and health club channels.
"They did a lot of stuff really well. They were ahead of us," said one of the Democrats' get-out-the-vote managers who did not want to be identified. "They had a strategy set by the beginning that they were going to live and die by. And we didn't."
In an election with a 2.6 percent margin of victory, the Bush campaign was run to ensure that every dollar went to fulfill core strategies, that resources were allocated to capitalize on Bush's strengths and on Kerry's vulnerabilities, and that the money necessary to finance research, technological advance, television and the ground war was available when needed.
At the July Democratic National Convention in Boston, McAuliffe commented on the disciplined Republican team: "We are up against the dirtiest, meanest, toughest group of people we have ever faced. They have money, they have power, and they ain't going to give it up easily."
Researcher Alice Crites, database editor Sarah Cohen and research database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows
By Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01
In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.
But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.
In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.
Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.
"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic voters away from us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said. "They were much more sophisticated in their message delivery."
The ultimate test of the two campaigns is in the success of their efforts to increase turnout from 2000. Kerry and his allies increased the Democrat's vote by about 6.8 million votes; Bush increased his by nearly 10.5 million. In the key battleground of Ohio, Bush countered Kerry's gains in the metropolitan precincts by boosting his margin in exurban and rural counties from 57 to 60 percent, eking out a 118,457-vote victory.
A supposed strategic advantage for the Democrats -- massive support from well-endowed independent groups -- turned out to have an inherent flaw: The groups' legally required independence left them with a message out of harmony with the Kerry campaign.
A large part of Bush's advantage derived from being an incumbent who did not face a challenger from his party. He also benefited from the experience and continuity of a campaign hierarchy, based on a corporate model, that had essentially stayed intact since Bush's 1998 reelection race for Texas governor.
Take Office, Plan Campaign
When Bush moved into the Oval Office in 2001, planning for his presidential reelection campaign began almost immediately. Under the direction of Karl Rove, Bush's top White House adviser who served as a kind of chairman of the board, White House political director Kenneth B. Mehlman, the chief executive officer, pollster Matthew Dowd, chief operating officer, and Mark McKinnon, the principal media consultant, the Bush political team developed a strategy for 2004, began investing in innovative techniques to target voters and prepared an early and cost-effective advertising plan. During this period, the Republican National Committee, where much of the planning was based, outspent its Democratic counterpart by $122 million.
In 2001, Dowd said that "we made some of the basic strategic assumptions about what we thought the election would look like."
One fundamental calculation was that 93 percent of the voting-age public was already committed or predisposed toward the Democratic or Republican candidate, leaving 7 percent undecided.
Another calculation was that throughout the Bush presidency, "most voters looked at Bush in very black-and-white terms. They either loved and respected him, or they didn't like him," Dowd said. Those voters were unlikely to change their views before Election Day 2004.
That prompted Republicans to jettison their practice of investing 75 to 90 percent of campaign money on undecided voters. Instead, half the money went into motivating and mobilizing people already inclined to vote for Bush, but who were either unregistered or who often failed to vote -- "soft" Republicans.
"We systematically allocated all the main resources of the campaign to the twin goals of motivation and persuasion. The media, the voter targeting, the mail -- all were based off that strategic decision," Dowd said.
Republican officials said they put $50 million into "ground war" drives to register and turn out millions of new voters in 2001 and 2002, and an additional $125 million after that.
Meanwhile, Kerry, faced with a difficult primary campaign and infighting and turnover among his consultants, did not begin seriously to address the general election until after his Super Tuesday primary election victory in March, eight months before the November vote. By that time, the campaign was hamstrung by legal restrictions on any cooperation between the campaign and the independent 527 organizations running ads and mobilizing voters on Kerry's behalf.
527s' Ineffective Messages
The 527 groups, named after a section of the tax code and allowed by law to accept unlimited contributions, provided invaluable help in registering and turning out voters. America Coming Together put about $135 million into what became the largest get-out-the-vote program in the nation's history. But the 527s, fueled with money from billionaires such as George Soros, proved ineffective in helping Kerry deliver a consistent and timely message in his advertising.
Of all the money spent on television advertising for the Democratic nominee, Kerry's campaign controlled 62 percent, according to spending totals analyzed by The Washington Post. The rest was spent on ads whose content or placement could not be coordinated with the campaign. The Bush campaign controlled 83 percent of the money spent on its behalf, giving it far more control over when and how it advertised.
At two junctures, when Kerry was either out of funds or under pressure to conserve resources for the close of the campaign, the absence of an overall strategy had damaging consequences: in March 2004, just when the Bush campaign began its first anti-Kerry offensive; and in August 2004, when the Swift Boat Veterans commercials raised questions about Kerry's service in the Vietnam War.
The Democratic media 527s "didn't do what we wanted done," Kerry media adviser Tad Devine said. "We would have run ads about Kerry, we would have had answers to the attacks in kind, saying they were false, disproved by newspapers."
Harold Ickes, who ran the Media Fund, a 527 organization that raised about $59 million in support of Kerry, said the federal election law prohibiting communication with the Kerry campaign created insurmountable obstacles in crafting effective, accurate responses to anti-Kerry ads. Ickes said he regretted not responding to the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks, but at the time he thought they seemed "a matter so personal to Senator Kerry, so much within his knowledge. Who knew what the facts were?"
Early Research Is Like Yeast
The 2002 elections, along with the Kentucky and Mississippi gubernatorial contests the following year, became testing grounds for the Republican effort to mobilize supporters. Designed to get base voters to the polls, it became known as the "72 Hour Project," whose cost Republican officials refused to disclose but is estimated by sources to have been in the $200 million range.
Under Dowd's direction, the RNC began investing in extensive voter research. One of the most striking findings, according to Republican consultants, was the ineffectiveness of traditional phone banks and direct mail that targeted voters in overwhelmingly Republican precincts. The problem: Only 15 percent of all GOP voters lived in precincts that voted Republican by 65 percent or more. Worse, an even smaller percentage of "soft" Republicans, the 2004 target constituency, lived in such precincts.
The RNC decided to cast a wider net for voters. But to work, Dowd's motivation and mobilization strategy needed expensive, high-tech micro targeting to cherry-pick prospective Republicans who lived in majority Democratic neighborhoods.
Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic.
Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine "anger points" (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other "flags." Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message.
"You used to get a tape-recorded voice of Ronald Reagan telling you how important it was to vote. That was our get-out-the-vote effort," said Alex Gage, of TargetPoint. Now, he said, calls can be targeted to specific constituencies so that, for example, a "right to life voter" could get a call warning that "if you don't come out and vote, the number of abortions next year is going to go up. "
Dowd estimated that, in part through the work of TargetPoint and other research, the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to "quadruple the number" of Republican voters who could be targeted through direct mail, phone banks and knocking on doors.
Democrats had access to similar data files. But the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to make far better use of the data because they had the time and money to conduct repeated field tests in the 2002 and 2003 elections, to finance advanced research on meshing databases with polling information, and to clean up and revise databases that almost invariably contained errors and omissions.
"Very few people understand how much work it takes to get this technology to actually produce political results. We are one election cycle behind them in this area," said a Democrat who helped coordinate voter contact in the 2004 campaign.
The Bush campaign's early fundraising success made much of this possible. By March 2004, Bush had $110 million in the bank and virtually no debt. During this period, Kerry was forced to spend all his time and money in the Democratic primaries, a fight that cost him $36 million and that left him $5 million in debt.
"Nobody was giving a thought at all to the general election," said Kerry pollster Mark S. Mellman. Until that March, "it was: How do we survive this week?"
Bush Ads Undermine Kerry
Two days after Super Tuesday, the Bush campaign, anticipating Kerry would have no money to respond, began a $40 million, six-week televised assault designed to crush the Democratic nominee before he could get off the ground. "We had a financial advantage over them for four to six weeks. That's why we did what we did," Dowd said.
With a $177 million ad budget, the Bush campaign and its allies ran more than 101,000 anti-Kerry "attack" or negative ads, more than the combined total of "positive" and "contrast" ads, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, based on data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus ratings of media buying effectiveness.
Less than 5 percent of Kerry's ads were "attack" or negative, according to the Wisconsin advertising project, and the remaining 95 percent were positive or contrast ads.
During March and April, before the candidate had replenished his war chest to finance TV ads, Kerry strategists were convinced that Kerry needed a barrage of positive biographical ads describing him in a sympathetic light to counter the negative picture drawn by the Bush ads. But when the Democratic 527s began their ad campaign, they aired negative ads reflecting their intensely anti-Bush donor base.
By the time Kerry had raised enough money to begin his positive ad campaign two months later, the Bush "attack" ads had helped convert the ratio of Kerry's positive to negative ratings in battleground states. Kerry's positive ratings fell from 40 percent to 35 percent, and his negative ratings rose from 24 percent to 36 percent at the start of May, according to the National Annenberg Election Surveys.
The negative Bush barrage was followed in August by the Swift Boat Veterans ads, the first one airing on just four cable channels at a cost of $546,000. The Swift Boat Veterans eventually would raise and spend $28 million, but the first ad was exceptionally cost-effective: most voters learned about it through free coverage in mainstream media and talk radio.
An additional Republican television commercial that significantly affected the race, according to surveys, was a positive spot financed by a second GOP 527 group, Progress for America. It invested $17 million in "Ashley's Story," which featured Ashley Faulkner, 11, whose mother had been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, describing her meeting with Bush.
GOP Dollar Power
Overall, Kerry, the DNC and the Democratic 527s spent $344 million on ads, while Bush and the GOP counterparts spent about $289 million, much of which was disbursed in the final three months. Arguably, Republicans got more bang for their bucks.
The Bush campaign's early strategy decisions shaped GOP spending. Under the guidance of Rove, Dowd and Mehlman, the Bush campaign had financed early research into ways to communicate to center-right voters through nontraditional media.
The Bush campaign concluded that many of their voters did not trust the networks and the establishment press, and therefore did not trust messages transmitted through them.
Mehlman said that talk radio and cable television "are more credible" to potential Bush voters. Ultimately the Bush campaign invested an unprecedented $20 million in narrowly targeted advertising on cable and in radio, with a heavy emphasis on religious, talk and country and western stations, and such specialty outlets as golf and health club channels.
"They did a lot of stuff really well. They were ahead of us," said one of the Democrats' get-out-the-vote managers who did not want to be identified. "They had a strategy set by the beginning that they were going to live and die by. And we didn't."
In an election with a 2.6 percent margin of victory, the Bush campaign was run to ensure that every dollar went to fulfill core strategies, that resources were allocated to capitalize on Bush's strengths and on Kerry's vulnerabilities, and that the money necessary to finance research, technological advance, television and the ground war was available when needed.
At the July Democratic National Convention in Boston, McAuliffe commented on the disciplined Republican team: "We are up against the dirtiest, meanest, toughest group of people we have ever faced. They have money, they have power, and they ain't going to give it up easily."
Researcher Alice Crites, database editor Sarah Cohen and research database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Thursday, December 30, 2004
The Blue Lemur - Progressive Politics and Media News � Another teen dies after being Tasered
Should be the after Holiday Special Gifts on the Charity Circuit: Tasers for Tots
The Blue Lemur - Progressive Politics and Media News � Another teen dies after being Tasered
The Blue Lemur - Progressive Politics and Media News � Another teen dies after being Tasered
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Left I on the News: Author didn't research issue very well
I must be in a contrarian mood this evening. This is another blog entry raising a flag for a false reason. The answer to this 4% portion of the vote question is that the Ukranian ballot allows a "none of the above" option.
News Report
Left I on the News
News Report
Left I on the News
Governments Purposely Allowed The 2004 Tsunami Disaster To Happen!!!
My two cents: Here's an example, in my mind, of half-truth. And "news" entries like these dilute the truth that this blog and others are exposing.
Governments Purposely Allowed The 2004 Tsunami Disaster To Happen!!!
Governments Purposely Allowed The 2004 Tsunami Disaster To Happen!!!
Audio Interview with David Ray Griffin on Flashpoints
Listen to KPFA Radio's Program on the 9/11 Cover Up -- PASS THIS ON WIDELY
Author, David Ray Griffin, dissembles the 9/11 Commissions report piece by
piece. OUR DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE. After listening to this, go to 911Truth.org
and get involved in the 9/11 truth movement. Forward this email to all you
know.
Yesterday's Flashpoints (Pacifica) radio show with Dennis Bernstein. The
entire show was a radio interview with David Ray Griffin discussing his newest
book on the 9/11 Commission.
Both of the below strings must be pasted into your browser address window:
http://www.kpfa.org/cgi-bin/gen-mpegurl.m3u?server=209.81.10.18&port=80&mount=
/data/20041227-Mon1700.mp3
If for some reason the link doesn't work, you can listen to the show
(Monday's) directly from the Flashpoints website here:
http://www.flashpoints.net
Author, David Ray Griffin, dissembles the 9/11 Commissions report piece by
piece. OUR DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE. After listening to this, go to 911Truth.org
and get involved in the 9/11 truth movement. Forward this email to all you
know.
Yesterday's Flashpoints (Pacifica) radio show with Dennis Bernstein. The
entire show was a radio interview with David Ray Griffin discussing his newest
book on the 9/11 Commission.
Both of the below strings must be pasted into your browser address window:
http://www.kpfa.org/cgi-bin/gen-mpegurl.m3u?server=209.81.10.18&port=80&mount=
/data/20041227-Mon1700.mp3
If for some reason the link doesn't work, you can listen to the show
(Monday's) directly from the Flashpoints website here:
http://www.flashpoints.net
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