Is this the country that you studied in eighth grade civics--the America the Great, with freedom for all about which we sing praises? Lately, I've been feeling rather ashamed of my country, because of the many things being done in her name that show no respect for what she stands for. Added to the long list of manipulation of the American public to justify a war of choice in Iraq (for Big Oil? for military hegemony? if not, then for what?), FEMA's failure during and after Katrina, White House interference in science at the FDA, White House disregarding science at the EPA and White House dissing science at Dover PA, the last few months have brought more bad news about the Bush Administration's handling of matters from here to Iraq.
Here at home, the smell of corruption and cronyism is overpowering. Michael Brown, Bush's buddy, who bungled every tiny thing connected with provision of relief to the evacuees and stranded on the Gulf Coast, who worried about his tie and having enough time for a leisurely dinner while people were starving and thirsting and fearing in the Convention Center, stayed on the U.S. payroll as--you couldn't make this up--a consultant on handling emergencies. Read here. The original 30-day "consulting" contract with the federal government was then extended another thirty days (running up to about November 26), in order to get a full "download" of Brownie's experiences at FEMA. Read here and here. That's a pretty incredible waste of a $150,000 a year salary for someone who was so incompetent that he had to be fired! Now that he has finally left the federal payroll, Brown is starting up his own disaster emergency consulting firm. Read here. Who would hire him? Surely, not the federal government?
Contracts seem to get awarded to White House cronies with ease, and then to be permitted to be misused and abused without anyone really doing anything about it. Take our approximately $10 billion of contracts with Halliburton, mostly awarded on a no-bid basis (i.e., sweetheard deals), that have resulted in significant overcharges with no apparent consequences. For a good summary of the Halliburton problem, see this TruthOut information and the Washington Post's story about the FBI investigation of Halliburton, here.
Another example of the wacky way contracts have worked under this Administration is a Transportation Safety Administration contract awarded after 9/11. Changes to the contract added $343 million, to cover much more expensive interviews of screener applicants at hotels instead of offices. Nobody can explain how the changes happened. The required back-up documentation doesn't exist, and there are conflicting versions of the story. Read more here.
Then, of course, there is Republican representative Randy Cunningham, now infamous for using his position to award millions of dollars in defense contracts as payback for $2.4 million in bribes and graft. Apparently, he wasn't upfront about his taxes owed either. Read the story here and here. That problem is a real one. How is it that a Congressman can ensure that defense contracts go to the people that are bribing him to get the contracts? Sounds like a problem that requires more than one player.
Regrettably, the Cunningham contract scandal is just one in a long list of scandals in the Congress and White House, including Texan Tom DeLay, who created a redistricting plan designed to ensure a win for Republicans and not for the American people; Senator Frist, whose sales of stock seemed opportunely timed after a long period of holding them and receiving reports on them even though he claimed he wasn't aware of his ownership; and of course Scooter Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, who has been indicted for obstruction of justice in the outing of Valerie Plame--and the lingering questions about Cheney and Rove who were also deeply involved in the discussions about Plame.
Contracts aren't our only worries. The quickly developing police state powers of the federal government and military are another. Alito, the judicial nominee who brought the right-wing cooing back to the White House nest, has been revealed more and more as exactly the right-wing ideologue that the conservatives so yearned for that they rejected Harriet Miers without giving her the up or down vote that they have always claimed judicial nominees are entitled to. First, we saw considerable information about Alito's disdain for privacy rights. Now, we learn that as a lawyer in the Regan Justice Department he was very active in implementing the Administration's plans to expand police powers. Read about his views in the New York Times. Alito argued that IRS lawyers should be able to secretly tape conversations, in spite of an ABA rule prohibiting lawyers from doing so; that the FBI should have broad investigatory powers regarding federal employees; and that prosecutors should be able to investigate persons even when they did not have a good faith belief that they might have been involved in criminal activity! In the context of a country with the so-called Patriot Act still in force--and Congress showing no understanding that it must drastically cut back on the powers that have been ceded to the military and law enforcement in this country--confirmation of Alito would likely tip the Supreme Court off the delicate balancing position that it has held over the last decade and into a full scale retreat to pre-New Deal views. That is at the least worrisome, and perhaps even frightening--disappeared citizens and secret investigations of individuals who have done nothing to engender suspicion other than dissent from government positions are the marks of a totalitarian police state, not a free democracy.
Of course, one mark of a police state is use of torture. You'd think that would be an easy one for the United States, but regretably we live in an era when the White House and Justice Department have drafted various memos supportive of anything short of outright causation of death. The White House position on torture is that the US doesn't do it but the CIA should have the right to, anyway. Dick Cheney actively lobbies for torture with his characteristic sneer, threatening a presidential veto to any bill not allowing it. David Rogers reported in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that the Administration was now seeking a "compromise" on the torture bill now being debated in Congress. John McCain thinks that "the president wants to work this out." Hold up here. How can there be any "working out" of a difference between a position that views inhumane treatment as abominable and off limits for all US personnel of whatever status and a position that thinks that sometimes it is okay to commit torture? There is no sometimes-it's-ok-to-torture position. It is especially hard to see how that difference can be "worked out" when the United States is a signatory to conventions that ban torture for any reason, making that ban on torture the law of the land.
That same report in the Journal revealed more of the wheeling and dealing that is the death of a true democracy. Senate Republicans passed a bill permitting oil drilling in the Arctic, but the House stood up to the Big Oil lobby and rejected Arctic drilling. Senator Stevens from Alaska, a buddy of Vice President Cheney and the Big Oil industry, swears that Arctic oil drilling must take place. The Republicans are thinking about getting some of the Democrat weak sisters in the Gulf Coast to come along with the vote by voting to give them a greater share of oil royalties from drilling in the offshore waters of their own states. Money seems to be the only thing that talks frankly in the corridors of this Congress and White House.
Then there's the FDA and its handling of the morning-after pill. Studies show that easy access to the pill can significantly reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. See here. Politicization of the approval process at the FDA was clearly evident, in that the top political people at FDA decided not to approve the pill well before the scientific review committees had done their work (and recommended approval). See here and here. It appears that this is another case where the Bush Administration's particular religious views are forcing scientific policy decisions.
Meanwhile, the bungling of the US intelligence agencies continues apace. Sunday papers revealed that officials at the FBI had mishandled a Florida terror investigation, resulting in alterations of documents to cover missteps, improper backdating of forms, and failure to oversee tapings correctly. In addition, the agency retaliated against a whistleblower who tried to draw attention to the problems. See this story in the New York Times. As the report notes, this was merely the latest in a string of whistle-blowers who indicate they have been "effectively silenced for voicing concerns about terror investigations ... since September 2001." An ACLU spokesperson noted that Congress needs to pass additional protections for whistle-blowers, because the courts are reluctant to protect them.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than 2000 U.S. soldiers have died and many thousands more have been wounded, and many tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians have perished in teh crossfire, corruption and shame co-exist. Last Thursday, a U.S. Army Reserve officer, Lt. Col Michael B. Wheeler, was charged with looting cash that was supposed to be used for reconstruction in Iraq. He was the third person arrested in the corruption probe. Read more about this story here and here.
As for using our occupation of Iraq to teach something about the due process requirements of the rule of law, our record is not stellar, to say the least. Just this month, 169 people were found huddled in miserable conditions in one of Saddam's ministry buildings. It appears that the largely Shiite security forces, made up often of religious militias, that the occupying army has put in power in place of the largely Sunni army that Saddam headed is resorting to tactics not dissimilar from Saddam's--dragging people out of their homes, taking them without any kind of process to various hidden away sites, sometimes beating or torturing them, mutilating them with electric drills, sometimes executing them. Read more about these events here. The Iraqi government denies involvement and claims reports of torture are exagerated, here. The American government is up in arms, here, but detaining suspects and running prisons are activities for which we may not have presented a clearly differentiated model of the rule of law. For years, since our occupation of Iraq began, we have been imprisoning tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys on mere suspicion, putting them behind bars in Saddam's old prisons, engaging in questionable interrogation techniques and sometimes torturing them (remember Abu Ghraib), and, according to the military's own records, murdering some of them. See here, for example. Lower level military personnel are sometimes charged with crimes (remember Private England), but the military brass get at most a tap on the wrist. Between Saddam's example and our own, is it such a surprise that the Shiite forces are doing things similarly? Or that people around the world may have a very negative view of the United States and its motives for occupying Iraq? See, for example, this story.
Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan where we never quite did for the people what we had promised, we continue to hold hundreds of terror "suspects" in military detention. We have not set a proud example to these countries of how due process works. Our laws call for arrestees to be charged within hours of their arrest or set free, to be held in humane conditions, to be entitled to the presence of a lawyer when being questioned, to have a right to access to the evidence against them, to have a right to a fair and speedy trial at which they can confront their accusers. But in the zeal to defeat terrorism, a plague that has been with man since he first formed societies, we have failed to provide these basic protections to our own citizens who have been held incognito in military brigs. We have held thousands of those we unilaterally declare to be "enemy combatants" without charge, some for more than two years at Guantanamo or prisons in Afghanistan (see here), so is it surprising that Afghanistan and Iraq have not learned the basic principles of due process from us?
Then, on top of all that, we run a prison so poorly that four of the most dangerous detainees in Afghanistan were able to walk out the door. See here. It almost seems like something from Charade--a bungled job so bad that there might be a plan behind it hoping to infiltrate al Queda.
To top it all off, we now learn that the Pentagon has been buying journalists in Iraq just as it did in the United States, and paying for planted stories (some of them critical, from an "Iraqi" point of view, of Americans who dissent on the Administration's war policy). See (or hear) the stories on NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post. The Times reported that one of the planted stories claimed that Iraq was moving steadfastly towards democracy. As Kennedy noted, "If Americans were truly welcome in Iraq as liberators, we wouldn't have to doctor the news for the Iraqi people." NY Times, op.cit. Dean Schultz at Boston University's College of Communications commented that in the very process of claiming to fight against misinformation from other sources, the military is causing misinformation by having journalists run Pentagon stories without appropriate attribution. Wash. Post, op. cit. This despicable practice epitomizes all that is wrong with the Bush Administration--it's inability to acknowledge facts, its inability to admit mistakes, and its lack of concern for the existence of a vibrant free press as a cornerstone of democracy.
No wonder I'm feeling the blues about my country these days. Gerald Galison said it best in a letter to the New York Times published in the December 4 paper (at Wk 11). "[I]f we are content to be led by a dishonest, corrupt government, this will draw others into skepticism, cytnicism and ... into selfish self-interest and away from responsible government."
That's the problem, folks. The enemy is us. If we do not stop the development of a corrupt, oligarchic, corporatist, police state, we will be living in it.
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