More "Bush Lite" Under Obama

According to today's NY Times, the Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects abroad for interrogation but will monitor to insure they are not tortured, officials said. The article, Rendition of Terror Suspects Will Continue Under Obama, stresses the modifications intended to protect detainees:

"Unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused.

'The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,' said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations."

Thus continues Obama's practice of continuing the distasteful and counterproductive security policies from the Bush era, repackaged for a "kinder and gentler" appearance. Other examples: continuing indefinite detention of detainees, military tribunals, and warrantless domestic wiretapping.

We all understood Obama had a pragmatic streak, but I have yet to see the benefit from these policies. There is a definite difference between pragmatism and recklessness. The Obama Letdown has begun in earnest!

IRAN: Activist issues preemptive retraction of future confession

Only in Iran...

From the LA Times:

IRAN: Activist issues preemptive retraction of future confession:

"What do you do when your imprisoned friends and political allies admit to plotting against the Islamic Republic of Iran in an elaborate and suspiciously scripted series of televised confessions?

What if you're worried you're next?

You could skip town or keep quiet. Or, if you are prominent opposition activist Mohsen Armin, you can try and beat the authorities at their own game by issuing a retraction of any future televised confession in anticipation of your own arrest and possible torture.

Armin, a member of Islamic Revolution Combatants Organization, or the IRCO, posted the renunciation on his website under the glib headline “I look forward to being detained.”

“If the providence of God requires that I will be in jailed as my brethren have been so far and if, in jail and under pressure, I say something against what I have said, be sure that it is not my true belief and that I recanted under pressure," he wrote."

[-- Meris Lutz and Ramin Mostaghim, Los Angeles Times
Photo: Opposition activist Mohsen Armin. Credit: Roozonline.com ]

Next, will it be Osama bin Laden? Ayman al Zawahiri? Might al Qaeda activists want to preemptively retract any confessions they might make under American interrogation, particularly of "enhanced" nature? Lest we forget, waterboarding is out, but still sanctioned are extreme heat/cold, sleep deprivation, and isolation...

Saturday Mornings

Why was I blessed with children that are social misfits? Don't normal people know that when someone is laying down on the bed, eyes closed, not responding to sound, that they should be left alone? When it is early Saturday morning and barely light, my kids actually know to go play somewhere else if they wake up. But as soon as their little brains think of something funny or interesting, they MUST share it with me, regardless of my state of mind (usually comatose). They can't simply wait until I wake up, or tell each other instead of me. No, they must awaken the sleeping beast, at their own risk, so they can feel the joy of telling me what is on their mind at 6am.


My kids must also be very slow learners, because this experience cannot possibly be very joyful for very long. Once the sleeping beast awakens to hear some trivial bit of information, usually at GREAT LENGTH
(Mom wouldn't it be funny if we went on a trip to South America and saw all the dinosaurs living there and one of them flew up to the sky and fire came out of his mouth and all the clouds melted and the butterflies turned into raindrops so that the plants could drink water?) my maternal instincts momentarily shut down and something deep inside me says DESTROY THE GREMLIN THAT HAS RUINED MY SLUMBER, and honestly, I don't think I can be held responsible for what happens when I am not entirely in control of my senses.

You would think they would learn someday, but so far, no dice. There simply must be something evolutionarily backward about this.

It isn't much better when my autistic stepdaughter, who has problems keeping her clothes on ("they're itchy," she says) - but who is really getting to that age where she needs to keep her clothes on - decides early Saturday morning NOT to wake me up, instead opting to go naked trampoline jumping and peanut-butter eating (yes, try that one!) in our back yard. Thank god it was the much less-visible BACK yard. I kid you not, this is no exaggeration. I hate to think what the neighbors may be thinking: Wow, our very own version of The Man Show - Girls on Trampolines! (God Forbid!)

So it looks like I simply can't win. Saturday mornings, those blissful, quiet, cartoon-filled hours I remember from my childhood, are now tortuous, bleary-eyed, monster-filled (choose your monster) chase-fest. It almost makes me long for an empty nest.

Great links about health care

Given all the misinformation circulating about health care, it seems relevant to post a few of my favorite health care links - the ones I have found the most informative.

How American Health Care Killed My Father
The Atlantic September 2009

After the needless death of his father, the author, a
business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care
industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular
quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is
not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the
health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a
radical solution to an agonizing problem.


Why We Must Ration Health Care
New York Times Magazine July 15, 2009

A bioethicist takes on the hard questions: how much is a life worth? How to determine the cost-effectiveness of new treatments and cut medical costs? Is rationing health care evil? These and other questions must be addressed to effectively solve many of the stickiest problems facing health care reform, says Peter Singer.


Ezra Klein: A Rational Look at Rationing
Washington Post June17, 2009

Ezra Klein makes the argument that rationing already goes on: we ration health care by ability to pay. Since health care isn't unlimited, we will have to "ration" it somehow. Should we ration it well or badly?


The Treatment (The New Republic's health care blog)
Blog about health care issues. Informative, generally free of polemics, cuts through a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the issue.


Health Co-Op Offers Model for Overhaul
NY Times July 6, 2009

Describes health insurance cooperatives, using the example of Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. These cooperatives may end up as an alternative to the "public option" in health care reform, though the jury is out as to how effective they are in cutting costs and improving health outcomes.


Health Reform for Beginners: The Difference Between Socialized Medicine, Single-Payer Health Care, and What We'll Be Getting
Washington Post June 9, 2009

Discusses the definition, similarities, differences between "single payer" and "socialized medicine."

New Gitmo Decision Offers Unusual Insight Into Weakness of Government Evidence

Why does the Obama administration continue to detain foreign nationals for years on end with only the flimsiest of evidence to justify their ongoing detention? Of 31 cases completed since the Supreme Court allowed detainees to challenge their detention in court, 28 were found to be held unlawfully. Of those 28, 19 are still in detention. WTF????

ProPublica reports:

New Gitmo Decision Offers Unusual Insight Into Weakness of Government Evidence:

by Chisun Lee, ProPublica -

A recent federal court decision that yet another Guantanamo captive’s detention is illegal offers the most detailed picture to date of how the government is struggling, often unsuccessfully, to justify indefinite imprisonments with sometimes thin and unverifiable evidence. The government’s difficulties in proving these cases are likely to persist even if the detainees are moved to U.S. soil or if a new detention review system is created.

The judge evaluating Al Mutairi’s imprisonment issued a lengthy written opinion detailing and eviscerating the government’s evidence.

Al Mutairi’s case was the first to be completed by Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a judge with considerable national security experience, in the slew of lawsuits brought by some 200 Guantanamo inmates. In these lawsuits, known as habeas corpus petitions, the detainees claim the government wrongly imprisoned them as enemies in the conflict with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The cases have been randomly assigned among the 15 judges of the federal trial court in Washington, D.C.

ProPublica recently examined 31 cases completed since a June 2008 Supreme Court decision empowered federal trial courts to scrutinize and, if called for, overturn presidential detention decisions. Case by case, the judges have been answering core questions that policy experts have addressed in theory: When can the president place someone in preventive detention, and how solid does the evidence need to be? (Our analysis of the cases was co-published as an op-ed by the New York Times.)

Judges have found 28 detainees to be unlawfully held. Nineteen of these men remain jailed at Guantanamo. More lawsuits continue to move ahead...

After reviewing the government’s classified evidence, the judge last week concluded that "there is nothing in the record beyond speculation" that Al Mutairi had "become a part of al Qaida or an associated force of al Qaida," as the government alleged. She ordered the Obama administration to "take all necessary and appropriate steps to facilitate Al Mutairi’s release forthwith."

The government’s evidence failed to sway her, because it was sparse and unreliable.

She said some of it was "unfinished" or "raw" intelligence that, by the government’s own admission, had never been "fully analyzed for its ‘reliability, validity, and relevance.’"

A "typographical error in an intelligence report" led the government incorrectly to claim for more than three years that Al Mutairi had manned an anti-aircraft weapon in Afghanistan, the judge wrote. The report had confused Al Mutairi’s internment serial number – a unique identifier assigned each detainee – with that of the person actually suspected of manning the weapon.

The government gave the judge no reason to think the appearance of Al Mutairi’s name on certain prison lists – parts of the opinion suggest the prison was in Pakistan – meant he was affiliated with al Qaeda, the judge said. "Multiple independent sources" had testified that such lists were collected by guards merely to inform family members of the whereabouts of the incarcerated, and administration lawyers supplied no proof to the contrary.

Among the pieces of evidence the judge rejected in the Al Mutairi case was a passage from an account of the detainee’s own interrogation...

Kollar-Kotelly discussed Al Mutairi’s "agitated" state of mind at the time he gave the statement and says "he appears to have been goaded into making these statements by the linguist in the interrogation room."

During another interrogation, the judge said, an agitated Al Mutairi claimed that 'he was Osama bin Laden." She quoted a passage from that interrogation report, which is striking because it reveals the detainee’s seeming frustration and despair over his treatment in U.S. custody:

ISN [Internment Serial No.] 213 was uncooperative. He stated that he wished to be called Osama bin Laden . . . ISN 213 stated he was an enemy of America because Americans had told him so. Americans cursed his parents. Prior to the war, he’d had no problem with Americans. But due to the situation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and legal process being so useless, he might as well be Osama bin Laden, since he was never going to be freed from U.S. custody.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

My question is: why does the Obama administration insist on retaining these prisoners? What happened to Obama the candidate who insisted on closing GITMO detention center ASAP?

Glenn Beck's Near Death Experience: "The Best Health Care in the World"

This is one of the things that makes me so angry about the health care debate today - the utter dishonesty among some of those claiming the US has "the best health care in the world." Our health care system is a mess: we spend thousands more per capita ($2500/cap) but we have worse health - lower life expectancy, and the WHO ranks our health care system near the bottom of industrialized countries. Is this the "best health care in the world"? Shouldn't Glenn Beck have a more reserved opinion of US health care after his near-death experience?

“The Sorrowful Decline of the Arabs”

“The Sorrowful Decline of the Arabs”: "

"In the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami writes today that the vibrant display of political activism in Iran since its elections highlights the relative “stagnation” of politics in the Arab world. He writes that the recent UN Arab Human Development Report dissects the condition of the Arab state and sadly recognizes that despite oil wealth, the region has an autocratic political culture, high unemployment, floundering economies and widespread poverty. States have failed their people, contends Ajami, but leaders have nevertheless become masters of personal political survival, which is reinforced by shortcomings in strong opposition movements, the middle class, and power of property the private sector.

Ajami is critical of the UN Arab Human Development Report’s authors, but narrows his argument to criticize a new American policy in the Middle East under President Obama. This policy values the status quo over the “risks of liberty,” he writes, and misses opportunities at supporting democracy." (Project on Middle East Democracy)

One of the most notable things about the Iranian Uprising is the relative quiet in the Arab world. Even the Egyptian Kefeya movement cannot mobilize more than a few dozen protesters, while Iranian dissenters were able to fill the streets with thousands. One could speculate as to the reasons for the difference. Ajami seems to imply it is cultural, as if the Arabs were somehow incompetent or growing more impotent without Washington's prodding. In fact, if one were to draw any conclusions about American influence, it might be the opposite: where American influence is the weakest (Iran) democratic impulses are the strongest. Only where American influence props up dictators and stifles civil society do popular movements fail.