WhirledView

Watchdogs of Democracy? a review

By PHK

Helen Thomas’ latest book, Watchdogs of Democracy? is a reflection on and lamentation about the profession of American journalism today. Its subtitle is “The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public.”

“Watchdogs” is laced with personal anecdotes and remembrances of better times, scrappier journalists and far more competent political leaders. It also provides words of caution and explanation to an American public as to why and how the US media uncritically sold the Bush administration’s concocted WMD story in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Then when WMD turned up missing, W changed the narrative numerous times. Thomas details how the MSM let him get away with it hook, line and sinker.

Much of Thomas’ story has been told before – but there are knowledgeable, well-read Americans who still fail to grasp the ramifications of the erosion of the “Fourth Estate” over the past 15 or so years. They continue to ask why the public is so poorly informed about events of the day and how the context for putting those events in perspective has disappeared.

Others attack Thomas personally, not for what she says but because it’s clear they continue to follow this self-proclaimed “war president’s” line without bothering to read, listen or think about how his imperial presidency contorts the country’s democratic form of government by restricting the public’s right to know and impeding the media’s responsibility to inform them.

As I write this review (WV was one of the blogs offered a review copy from Simon and Schuster and I jumped at the chance), the outing of the long before outed Swift consortium international terrorist financial transaction monitoring story by the New York Times and several other major U.S. newspapers is being castigated by the right with equal amounts of vituperative venom, political bias – and lack of information – that got the country into the ill-fated Iraq invasion to start. These same people have also unsurprisingly turned on Helen Thomas for raising hard questions and demanding – to no avail - the truth.

Ever more reason that readable, reasonably short books on why the MSM has too often failed the U.S. public written by well known personalities and veteran practitioners like Thomas are always welcome.

Talking to the Wind

By PLS

An article about the intelligent design versus evolution controversy in the spring 2006 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review has set me to wondering if social issues we western secular liberals have failed to address as moral crises at home might also be undermining our credibility with militant Islamists.

It’s not the science of evolution as such that most alarms proponents of Intelligent Design,” writes Michael Ruse in an essay entitled “Flawed Intelligence, Flawed Design.” ID-believing evangelicals are worried about the inevitable (to them) moral consequences of a materialist or naturalistic world view. If evolution through natural selection made us what we are, they fear, there’s nothing to stop society from going to hell in a handbasket, so to speak, and conservative Christians as well as Islamists think American society is well on the way to perdition.

There are many people in the world today, Christians as well as Muslims, who believe that there is no way to promote any kind of moral or ethical code without a God to serve as guarantor, enforcer, validator. This, of course, is nonsense. In the course of civilization there have been many motives for good behavior and fear of god is only one of them. But Ruse thinks we should respond more earnestly to the moral concerns of evangelicals and fundamentalists of various sorts.

So here goes.

How much would it cost us, for example, to forthrightly agree that sexual promiscuity among young teenagers is a behavior to be strongly discouraged, even if we cannot wholly agree on why or what to do about it? I didn’t have a daughter, but I confess that I would have put a great deal of energy and imagination into delaying a daughter’s sexual initiation as long as possible. And I certainly didn’t take a boys-will-be-boys approach to my sons either. Moreover, whatever the gender of one’s offspring, the question of contraception must be addressed, later if not sooner–and hopefully not too late.

One problem (to my mind) is that trying to meet conservatives half way is not always an agreeable experience, by which I mean that it is all too often an unsuccessful operation. The abortion issue is instructive. Many who do not wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned would like to minimize abortion nearly as much as the most committed anti-abortionist.

The trouble is that issues get conflated and confused, so agreement becomes impossible. There are many ways to avoid the unwanted pregnancies that eventuate in abortion, but good numbers of conservative Christians accept only abstinence for contraceptive purposes. Result: no consensus—and (human sexuality being what it is, including among students at Christian schools such as the school where my god-fearing sister taught) unwanted pregnancies, which means otherwise unnecessary abortions as well as child motherhood and heart-breaking adoptions.

Similar dead ends result when western liberals (or secular Muslims) discuss the nature of the good society with Islamists. There’s profound, seemingly intractable disagreement on the role of women. Result: no congenial meeting point.

So, even if we do what Ruse seems to argue we should do, I’m not sure we’ll get anywhere. We liberals have principles that add up to a highly ethical code of life but our secularly derived morality is not recognized as such by those with whom we seek to establish understanding and respect if not perfect commonality.

If someone has a way out of this bind (aside from the inevitable changes that time brings), I’d be glad to learn of it.

Which is Your Tribe?

by CKR

Here's one of those internet questionnaires that tells you how you stand relative to the rest of the population. It seems to be connected with a book promotion, and it's Canadian.

Both of those connections make it a bit dicey for Americans, but I thought that my tribe fitted me pretty well, or perhaps vice versa.

Via Kevin Drum, whose tribe is here.

Keeping the lid on in Athens

By PHK

If you missed the chilling piece of investigative reporting in the Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2006 by Cassell Bryan-Low on a cell phone eavesdropping scandal that broke into the public in Athens, Greece earlier this year and has just escalated to a new level, it’s time to tune in.

This story is already an embarrassment to the conservative pro-American Greek government and, if it turns out badly, could negatively impact U.S.-Greek relations for years to come. Meanwhile, the Greek government is understandably doing its best to keep the lid on – but its leaders must be privately livid. Opposition parties PASOK and KKE charge cover-up; but who is being covered up and, if so, why?

The fallout from this scandal – regardless of the reality or the outcome - represents just one more unneeded credibility problem for the troubled Bush Administration in this southeast tip of the Balkan Peninsula whose people have been wary of U.S. intentions and involvement in their domestic politics since the end of World War II.

The WSJ report is the only one I’ve seen on this story in the asleep-at-the-switch American MSM. A search of the New York Times, WaPo and LA Times archives suggest that for these three illustrious newspapers, cell phone tapping of a European ally is, well, a non-story. The story is, however, one elsewhere and it is just one more nail in the U.S. Government’s already poor image in a country where the US invasion of Iraq and occupation are detested and where America’s image has been in trouble for years.

Reports of the Greek cell phone tapping scandal can be found in English and/or Greek on the BBC website as well as in the online Sunday Times of London and various Athens newspapers across the political spectrum. I found these via GOOGLE. I also found a report in Greek News online and Wikipedia. These stories date back to February.

They suggest that the WSJ article is, in many ways, a cautious first sighting of the tip of an iceberg that has just met global warming.

Here’s the chronology in a nutshell. It's an expanded and updated version of the one in the WSJ.

Tower Builders, Tower Tumblers

By PLS

Calling all parents!

I bet you have kids who like to build skyscrapers with blocks, Lego, whatever. I suspect your kids also get their biggest kicks from knocking towers down—especially the ones erected by less popular kids or by smaller, weaker siblings.

I bet you have kids who play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, Crusaders and Infidels, Star Wars, whatever. Of course, someone always has to be the bad guy, but that’s no problem.

It’s fun pretending to be the bad guy. Dressing up. Talking the talk. Walking the walk. A ten year old desperado. Darth Varder on a tricycle. Evil terrorists lurking in the lilacs. Older kids earnestly debating strategy: “How would we do it? How would we get away? Hee hee!”

Tower tumbling and role playing were a normal part of growing up in America, but times have changed. Neighbors may regard such activities as evidence of homegrown terrorism in the making and phone their suspicions to the FBI.

So your kids are in danger. Any night now the FBI will break into your house (in the wee hours of the morning, without knocking, thanks to the Roberts’ Five) and haul the kids off to juvenile court. They will probably be tortured, but don't worry. It’s legal. G.W. Bush has issued a signing statement to that effect.

And you, being patriotic, must rejoice! Kids like that are a danger to us all.

The more I contemplate the so-called plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago the more it seems only a few hairs removed from this somewhat implausible scenario. Someone, for some reason, ratted on these loony post-adolescents’ absurdly enacted wild imaginings. The FBI entrapped them. Now that they have been arrested, to great fanfare, the rest of us are supposed to feel safer. In fact, everything the Bush administration does with its ever-inflated grants of power scares me.

Could We Think Ahead This Time?

by CKR

Ashton Carter and William Perry today advocate striking North Korea's missile on the ground before it can be tested. It's not at all clear what is being tested or why. The timing of the test suggests that its primary function is to draw attention back to North Korea from Iran, or perhaps to make the point that North Korea is looking for some aspect of what has been offered to Iran.

Nonetheless, Carter and Perry take the test at face value and believe what the hitherto unreliable North Koreans say: that they are developing their missile capability. It's certainly possible that they will get some data out of the test, but that just doesn't look like their primary objective to me, anyway.

The United States, in a literalistic response, has declared that its uncompleted antimissile system in Alaska and California is now on full alert to shoot down any missiles aimed at America.

Carter and Perry argue that the missile should be taken out on the launch pad. Their reason is clear:

Third, the U.S. system is unproven against North Korean missiles and has had an uneven record in its flight tests. A failed attempt at interception could undermine whatever deterrent value our missile defense may have.

Kindly put, and to the point. Threatening with something that is likely not to work is a way to make a fool of oneself, and the history of missile defense so far allows no confidence that an attempted interception would work.

But isn't all this flurry of indignation and upset exactly what North Korea wants? It makes them look powerful, it exposes the uncertainty of US missile defense, and it redirects attention from Iran.

Neurosis and Risk at One Percent

by CKR

I bought my copy of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine last night, and I also watched the companion Frontline piece, "The Dark Side". I'm not far into the book yet, and Frontline didn't explore that one percent in particular, but since it's in the title, and since pretty much every book review (NYT, WaPo, more links by Froomkin) has mentioned that one percent, I'd like to point out a couple of things that I haven't seen said explicitly. Just as a reminder, here it is:

"If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."

For an individual, applying such a doctrine to one's life amounts to neurosis. I don't know how Cheney arrived at a numerical probability for Pakistani scientists helping al Qaeda; I suspect that that one percent is figurative, so I'll enumerate, without numerical probability, some of the bad things that can happen if you go outside your house. Automobile accident, whether you are in your car or on foot; attack by a stray dog; slips and falls on slick pavement; breathing in car exhaust or other emissions from construction or cleaning operations along with second-hand cigarette smoke; eating poorly prepared and therefore bacteria-filled food in a restaurant, not to mention greasy fast food; colliding with rockfalls or wild animals in your car. Staying at home isn't much better: slipping in the bathtub; electrocution from careless handling of electrical fixtures; burns from various hot surfaces; a housefire from an uncleaned chimney or falling asleep with a cigarett in hand. Lots of things can go very badly wrong, and occasionally do. A couple riding motorcycles were sideswiped by a car in Santa Fe the other day; a month or so ago, a pickup truck ran, full speed, into a medical waiting room.

Some people are paralyzed by these possibilities, and that is called neurosis. It appears that Dick Cheney's one percent draws the nation closer to this sort of paralysis.

Polygraphs

by CKR

A few years back, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to evaluate the usefulness of polygraph tests. They duly appointed a committee, which gathered the evidence and came to some conclusions. Those conclusions, basically, were that the studies that had been done on polygraphing were poor, so in some senses the jury was out, but what they could say was that for investigating individual incidents (like a specific instance of embezzlement in a bank), a polygraph could give results that were better than flipping a coin, but far from perfect.

For screening, like evaluating whether someone should be granted a security clearance, polygraph tests appear to be much less accurate.

The various agencies that had installed requirements for polygraph tests in response to someone's intuition or political pressures saw no reason not to continue what they had been doing.

Now the Washington Post confirms some of what's in that NAS report: different agencies get different results from their polygraphs. In a bureaucratic addendum, those agencies all insist that their results are the ones that should be followed. One of the instances appears to be harassment, something that has to be easy for a polygraph examiner to slip into or to justify.

The government wants to fix the problem, the article says, by streamlining the process and making it more uniform across the agencies, but the subjectivity inherent in polygraphing that the NAS reports makes any such thing unlikely. Besides, this is what bureaucracies always say when confronted with evidence of the sort in the WaPo article.

The article does mention that Aldrich Ames, who passed CIA information to the Soviets for years, managed to pass all his polygraph tests. The NAS report also considers countermeasures against polygraphs, which it finds can be effective.

The article doesn't mention the NAS report, though. It's fairly easy to find by googling (not the first in my search, but on the first page), and it seems to me that it's indispensable background to a story on polygraphing. Facts are always useful, along with the anecdotes.

Homeland Security

By PLS

I built a wall to keep us safe,
from you. You found rocks,
ladders, poles and somehow
got yourself over the top.

I added course after course
to make it higher. You
discovered weak spots
easy to ram or blow.

I engineered more strength
stretching it, to the East,
to the West, an endless chore,
but futile. There you were.

I decided on corners then.
Ends met to make a fort.
“Success!” I thought and relaxed.
You appeared with parachutes.

So I designed a roof
that bounces missiles, too.
And tunnels? Ridiculous.
I’ll foil any dig you start.

I bugged the phone lines, jammed
the wireless and satellites.
What you couldn’t overrun
you will never subvert.

I’m secure now, though joy
seems to have fled with risk
and days drag. The good old songs
and movies are—well!—old.

I wonder sometimes what’s new,
what’s happening, on your side.
Maybe I can open a chink
and smuggle in some life.

To the end of the earth: the story of New Mexico’s crypto-Jews – a book review

By PHK

Why would anyone in his or her right mind choose to emigrate from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World in the 16th or 17th century – first to Veracruz and Mexico City and then up to northern New Mexico and perhaps into southern Colorado - that inhospitable northern tip of Spain’s Empire in the New World - not all that long thereafter?

Stanley M. Hordes asked this question soon after he became New Mexico State Historian in 1981 after several descendants of New Mexico’s earliest Hispanic settlers had dropped by to report “unusual customs” practiced by people they knew. Having recently completed dissertation research on the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain (1620-1640) on a Fulbright grant, Hordes was intrigued. He was also uniquely qualified to search for the answer as he drew upon his own research as well as that of historians and others who had preceded and also collaborated with him.

His answer to this question forms the basis of his recent book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

What Hordes unveiled as a result of his and others painstaking research in New Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France and Mexico City through Inquisition records, interviews of descendants of original Hispanic settlers in New Mexico, visits to villages along the Spanish-Portuguese border and even access to DNA tests was that some of the earliest Hispanic settlers in New Mexico had been New Christians or crypto-Jews who had fled to this “end of the earth” rather than face subjugation, incarceration, torture, ridicule, humiliation and occasionally death at the vicissitudes of the Roman Catholic Church’s grand inquisitors.