Government Politics

W.H. counters Cheney with Biden

2010-02-13T17:12:00.000-08:00

Vice President Joe Biden's appearances on two Sunday morning talk shows this week are part of a White House strategy to both pre-empt and potentially respond to former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview on ABC's "This Week," where administration officials expect he'll continue to advance his sharp critique of President Obama's record on national security.

Cheney has been one of the strongest critics of Obama's handling of national security and foreign policy issues, and his interview comes amid an intense debate over the administration's handling of the accused Christmas Day bomber and the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

After Cheney's interview was announced Thursday, the White House lined up Biden for NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation."

Sunday's VP vs. VP lineup is a first, and the closest Biden and Cheney have come to an actual debate.

The pre-emptive part of the programming starts with "Meet the Press." Biden is scheduled to tape his "Meet" interview with David Gregory on Saturday evening from Vancouver. A White House official said that in the segment Biden will make the case for how aggressive the Obama administration has been in taking on al Qaeda.

An excerpt of Biden's interview will be released later Saturday evening under an embargo that will lift just as Cheney’s live sit-down with Jonathan Karl begins Sunday at 9 a.m. If Biden doesn't watch the interview from his perch in Vancouver, the official said, the vice president will most certainly be informed on what his predecessor says by someone who does.

Then at 10:30, Biden will be interviewed live by Bob Scheiffer on "Face the Nation," giving the vice president a chance to directly reply to whatever charges his predecessor had leveled earlier in the morning.

"If the former vice president wants to discuss the record on fighting al Qaeda and keeping America safe, then we thought it made sense for the current vice president to make the case for what the Obama administration has succeeded in doing," a White House official said.

Already the White House has started to leak more information to the press about its efforts to combat terrorism, something the White House believes Obama has not received enough credit for.

An Associated Press story Friday included some of the most detailed accounts yet of the administration's counterterrorism efforts, attributed to senior intelligence and law enforcement officials. The story highlighted the administration's belief that the war on terrorism campaign "can be waged even more aggressively than its predecessor's."

While Cheney has appeared on the Sunday talk shows several times since leaving office to blast the Obama administration, until now the White House has left push-back to lower-profile administration officials in the following hours or to Monday from the press secretary's podium.

The vice presidents have exchanged barbs in the media for over a year now.

Asked last December about Biden's comment that Cheney was "the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history," the Republican fired back that it seemed Obama "does not expect Biden to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time."

Biden said Cheney was "dead wrong" last spring when he said the Obama administration's policies made the country less safe. And when Cheney said Obama was "dithering" on his Afghanistan strategy, Biden said his predecessor's opinions were "irrelevant."

Obama: US Economy Won't Turn Around Quickly

2009-03-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

By: Reuters
President Barack Obama said Tuesday he saw little hope of near-term improvement in the U.S. economy after a staggering drop in gross domestic product in the final three months of last year."The economy's performance in the last quarter of 2008 was the worst in over 25 years. And frankly the first quarter of this year holds out little promise for better returns," he said in a speech at the Department of Transportation.

Obama said one of the main challenges facing his government was to unlock frozen credit markets and that the launch Tuesday of a new lending facility by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury was key to that effort.The consumer lending initiative will generate up to $1 trillion in lending.

"This will help unlock our credit markets, which is absolutely essential for economic recovery," Obama said, speaking two weeks after signing a $787 billion stimulus package aimed at jolting the economy out of recession.

The economy suffered its deepest contraction since early 1982 in the fourth quarter of last year, plummeting at a 6.2 percent annual rate as consumers pulled back sharply on their spending.

The grim data has contributed to the huge sell-off in the U.S. stock market, which hit a 12-year low this week.

Meanwhile, Obama's budget chief is on Capitol Hill defending the president's $3.6 trillion budget for next year as an honest accounting of the government's bleak fiscal woes.

Budget director Peter Orszag says Obama inherited a whopping deficit and an economy in crisis but that shouldn't block investments in education and an overhaul of the U.S. health care system to help the uninsured.

Orszag defended Obama's plan to raise taxes on people making $250,000 or more, saying the tax policies of President Bush transferred too much wealth to the rich.

Obama's budget is a nonbinding plan that will be reviewed extensively by Congress. It's an ambitious rewrite of the nation's priorities on health care, taxes and global warming, but faces big challenges because of its numerous controversial proposals.

The budget plan is coming under fire on Capitol Hill from a senior Republican, who is calling it the biggest expansion of government since the New Deal.

Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan told Obama's budget chief Peter Orszag at a House Budget panel hearing that administration claims of deficit-cutting are mostly bogus since the deficit would fall anyway as the war in Iraq winds down.

Ryan also warned Tuesday that tax increases on small businesses earning more than $250,000 a year would stunt a possible recovery and that the plan would double the national debt in eight years.

Ryan got first licks at the Obama plan since he's the top Republican on the panel. But Obama's budget also faces a difficult path through Congress because of its numerous controversial proposals on health care, taxes and global warming.
Copyright 2009 Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Obama's Transition To President May Be "Easiest" Part

2009-03-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

As President-elect Barack Obama rushes from secret job interviews with ex-primary rivals, to briefings on the global financial crisis, to discussions of saving the U.S. auto industry, the post-election period may feel frenetic.

But soon he and his transition team may look back fondly on this fleeting chance for "deliberate haste," as Obama has characterized pace of his Cabinet selection.

This fall running mate Joe Biden warned the incoming president would be tested within six months by an international crisis. But history shows the incoming rush of trouble doesn't wait for hours, much less months.

Bill Clinton fought controversy even before his inauguration for giving welfare reform a lower priority than health care—a decision whose political consequences Mr. Clinton would later regret.

On Clinton's first full day in office his Defense Secretary was ripped by the Joint Chiefs of Staff over his campaign pledge to let gays serve openly in the military. On his second full day, he accepted the withdrawal of his choice for Attorney General Zoe Baird over revelations that she had employed an illegal immigrant.

Within two months, Jimmy Carter soured his relations with a Democratic-controlled Congress by targeting water projects cherished by senior figures within his own party.

Within three months, Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt. John F Kennedy launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President George W. Bush faced a showdown with Beijing over a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet.

The Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad

2009-03-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

Conducted by Chris Chen

Mehrzad Boroujerdi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where he also serves as the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Co-Director of the Religion, Media and International Relations Project. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism and numerous articles in journals and edited books.

Iranian discontent with President Ahmadinejad’s strong rhetoric, hard-line politics, and publicstatements on religion—seen as improper for the secular president—continues to grow. How has Ayatollah Khamenei dealt with the criticism of Ahmadinejad, publicly and privately? Overall, have Ahmadinejad’s policies helped or hurt Khamenei?

Frankly, considering the rather nontransparent nature of Iranian politics, we are not privy to conversations that go on between those two individuals. What we can say, therefore, is really based on speculation and reading the tea leaves in terms of public pronouncements that each makes. Now, the Supreme Leader,

I think, because of his conservative predilections, has been rather supportive of Ahmadinejad. But I would not describe this as a blank check by any stretch of the imagination. On certain occasions, he has indirectly or diplomatically criticized Ahmadinejad for his rhetoric, for some of his choices, etc. Other individuals close to Ayatollah Khamenei have criticized Ahmadinejad for his actions. For example, in July 2008 when Ahmadinejad was introducing three new ministers for his Cabinet, he tried to get approval from the Iranian Parliament by saying that these folks had the blessing of the Supreme Leader. Then an editor of a conservative newspaper that is very close to Ayatollah Khamenei came out and criticized the president publicly and said, “You have misconstrued what the Supreme Leader told you in private.” That’s the type of thing you see—a number of people who speak for the Supreme Leader in that type of a context. But I think by and large, on the main issues—i.e., on the nuclear confrontation—he has been supportive of the president, but for example, when it came to questioning and politicizing the Holocaust, Khamenei did not necessarily come to Ahmadinejad’s defense and was quite silent on the issue.

Do you see Khamenei supporting Ahmadinejad in next year’s presidential election?

It depends, really, on who is in the running. Ahmadinejad was clearly not the first choice in 2005, when we had the ninth presidential election. Depending on who enters the scene, Khamenei might support a different horse in the race. For example, if the present Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, who is a former nuclear negotiator, enters the presidential race, that might make it more complicated for Khamenei to support Ahmadinejad. However, keep in mind that technically, he’s supposed to remain neutral and not endorse a particular candidate in the race. But again, as I said, people can read between the lines of what he says.

What role does the Iranian Parliament play in the relationship between the Ayatollah and the secular government? Given conflicts such as Ahmadinejad’s refusal to implement bills and Parliament’s rejection of Cabinet appointees, what kind of balance has been struck between the President and Parliament?

The Iranian Parliament is an institution that historically, because of the intense factional nature of Iranian politics, has seen a lot of debates and even at times fistfights erupt in the building. It is not a rubber-stamp institution, contrary to many of the parliaments of the region. What is the role of Parliament? Basically, Parliament is supposed to make sure that the government is pursuing policies that are consistent with the spirit of the Constitution or make socioeconomic sense. For example, Ahmadinejad, who has been pursuing a form of populist politics, has been going to the four corners of Iran and handing out money for various projects as a way of incurring favor with the locals. This has all been made possible thanks to an emergency fund set up under Khatami for the extra petrodollars—to keep them for a rainy day—so that Iran would not be subject to disruption. Ahmadinejad is tapping into that reserve of money to carry on these projects, so the Parliament has been clashing with him at times about his misuse of these emergency funds. As you pointed out, they have not given a green light to the people he has put forward as ministers.

For example, when he came into office in 2005, he had to put forward four different candidates before his Minister of Petroleum was approved by the Parliament—the first three were rejected. So the Presidency is not necessarily the ‘top gun’ institution in Iranian politics, by any stretch of the imagination, because you have all of these unelected bodies, like the Guardian Council or the Expediency Council, that in many ways can overrule or modify the decisions made by the Parliament. But the Parliament is important in Iranian politics because as an elected institution, it in some ways does reflect the public, and allows for circulation of elites, in a way for which the non-elected institutions would not allow. We see a lot of people who, for example, come to Parliament for one term and then get voted out—perhaps they couldn’t bring the pork barrel projects to their province, or perhaps they somehow managed to alienate either their constituency or powerful political factions, and therefore they have ended their experience in Parliament. Then there are others who have been there close to 30 years.

In a 2007 Syracuse Law Review article, you wrote, “President Ahmadinejad has nothing even close to solid control” because “[the] Iranian political structure...[has] multiple checks against a single individual attempting to assert control.” Is Ahmadinejad making any effort to consolidate power? Can he assert more control?

Well, he certainly is. To his credit, he has certainly used the office of the president much better than his predecessor, Mr. Khatami, to sort of flex his muscles and put himself on the map. Surely, through his pronouncements, he has endeared himself in a strange way to the media, buying publicity and so forth. I think the answer is that he is trying to do that, but I wouldn’t say that he has managed to fundamentally alter that configuration of power in Iran in any way. Based on the Constitution, the mandate of the president is a bit truncated. So, for example, one of the mistakes we make in the West is that we look at the American political system where the president is the commander-in-chief and assume that the Iranian president has the same authority. He doesn’t. In Iran, the buck does not stop with the President.

The Supreme Leader is the one that counts. You can have powerful individuals, like Rafsanjani, the former president, who now simultaneously leads two important institutions of power in Iran. So he becomes a political heavyweight that can rival the president. Yes, Ahmadinejad has been much more adept, much more successful in inserting himself into the Iranian political equation than a person like Khatami. Perhaps he can become as influential as Rafsanjani when he was President, but I wouldn’t even say Ahmadinejad has surpassed Rafsanjani in that sense, because he was much, much closer to Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder, than Ahmadinejad has ever been thought to be to Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.

What do the 2008 parliamentary elections, in which conservatives won more than 200 of 290 seats, show about how much the people support the government? What about the election of Larijani, seen as a more “pragmatic” critic of Ahmadinejad, as Speaker of Parliament?

I think the elections sent a different type of message than what people expected in the sense that there were a good number of independent-minded deputies who were elected.

Some of the individuals who are conservative but aren’t necessarily in the same camp as Ahmadinejad—in other words, the more pragmatic conservatives—did very well in the elections as well. We have already seen signs of disunity in the conversative camp, and certainly the election of Larijani himself as Speaker of the Parliament was a big show of support for these more pragmatic conservatives. Larijani may feel, perhaps, that Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric has unduly subjected Iran to more diplomatic pressure and public condemnation. This assessment will lead Larijani to try to contest some of Ahmadinejad’s policies in the remainder of this term and once again if he is reelected in 2009. Keep in mind that Larijani is the person whom Ahmadinejad basically forced out as the top nuclear negotiator, so his election as Speaker of Parliament speaks volumes about what goes on in Iranian politics and the fact that Ahmadinejad really doesn’t hold all of the keys.

In Oil in the Gulf, you predicted, “The deep-rooted demands for reform on the part of Iran’s young, educated and urban polity indicate that a genuine reformist social movement is quite capable of cutting its umbilical cord to President Khatami, should he fail to keep up the pace.” After Khatami’s rule, voter turnout amongst Iranians has decreased considerably. How have the political views of Iran’s population—in which approximately half the people are under 30—changed in the last decade?

I stand by what I said in that article. I think what has happened in Iran is that there has been a revolution of rising expectations because you have a young, urban, and educated population; as a result, there are a lot of pent-up demands among the constituency. However, this constituency in many ways feels betrayed by the failures of President Khatami to deliver on his reformist agenda. In that sense, they feel let down, and I think that partly explains the swing of popular mood in favor of Ahmadinejad in 2005. But they have, in my view, broken the umbilical cord to Khatami because already, in the speculation for the next round of elections, many of the mainstream reformists want Khatami to once again become their candidate, but there are already voices of dissent heard by people who say, “He had eight years; he didn’t accomplish much. Why should we put him on the ballot once again? We need better candidates or else we aren’t going to vote; we’re going to boycott the elections.” So you hear those types of sentiments, but unfortunately we are in a situation right now where the reformists do not necessarily have a charismatic candidate that they can put forward. I would not be surprised if they end up next year with Khatami as their top candidate.

In a 2007 article, you wrote, “Nationalism is still an important value within the regime and among the public...[it] is also a dangerous force, but it is at least something that we have experience with and can adapt our policy to deal with.” What role does nationalism play in the relationship between the government and the people, and how does it affect U.S. policy towards Iran’s nuclear program?

I think it plays a crucial, crucial role. Iranians are extremely nationalistic; regardless of all of the talk of Islamic affinity and so forth, at the core, they are extremely nationalistic. This is a country that has gone through the

unbelievable experience of the eight-year war with Iraq, which in many ways made the defense of the country’s sovereignty and its borders even more sacrosanct than before.

Therefore, no politician in Iran, at this point in time, can really pursue or advocate for policies that violate the spirit of nationalism. In many ways, ironically enough, the extra emphasis of the present regime on the Islamic identity has led to backlash on the part of many who are holding ever more tightly to their nationalistic sentiments. Some have gone back to the pre-Islamic identity of Iranians. I think as far as the nuclear issue is concerned, it is true that the Iranians think that this issue is one of national interest. Look at it this way—the Iranians feel that they are the big kid on the block, as far as the Middle Eastern region or Persian Gulf are concerned, and everywhere they look—to the east, west, north, south— they feel surrounded by other nuclear powers from Israel to Russia, India to Pakistan, China to North Korea. U.S. nuclear submarines are in the region. There is a contradiction there— you cannot be the big kid on the block and not have the goodies that your adversaries have.

So I think the Iranian government has been able to tap into that sense of the Iranian superiority complex, if you wish—their sense of nationalism—to justify the importance of this argument. Frankly, as long as the argument on the Iranian side is not about nuclear weapons but about nuclear energy—keep in mind that there is a shortage of electricity there—no one in their right mind would be able to go against this notion of wanting to have nuclear energy. If it’s good for the U.S. and France and the Western countries, why is it bad for Iran? I think that is really a subtext to this nuclear stalemate that we have right now. I think the high-handedness with which the folks in Washington have tried to handle Iran has not worked, and I think it is high time that we recognize that there is a need to change policy.

What conclusions can you draw from your research on the writings and debates between Iranian intellectual elites?

I think the debates in Iran are, frankly, really quite impressive, because three things have happened in Iran that haven’t happened in many other countries in the region. One, having experienced a genuine revolution, which we have hardly any of in the Middle East—we have had a lot of coups, palace coups, wars of national liberation, resistance to occupation, but nothing else on the scale of a massive homegrown revolution—Iran is set apart from the rest of the region. The second interesting experience is one of dealing with a theocratic state in the twenty-first century, with all the limitations and shortcomings of what a theocratic state can be. What’s interesting is that there was no blueprint for this new government to follow once it came into power in 1979 and that they had to go through this trial-and-error method of statecraft to learn on the job. Thirdly, this whole issue of what we are going to do with not just Western imperialism and so forth but with the legacy of Western modernity and Enlightenment thought. Are we going to have an Islamic, indigenous, native identity? These three phenomena have given rise to very serious discussions on the nature of modernity, on cultural relativism, on how we can understand tradition, on the essential moral fabric of Eastern societies, etc. I think in that sense, the discussions in Iran are far ahead of, let’s say, what is going on in Iraq. They are not, perhaps, as sophisticated as what goes on in intellectual circles in India, but by the standards of the Middle East, they are quite deserving of more attention than what has been paid to them so far.

What kind of misunderstandings and assumptions do Iranians have about the West, and how do they affect Iranians’ views towards secularism and democracy?

I think it’s fair to say that in the same way that we have a lot of stereotypes and misunderstandings about Iran, they have their own types of stereotypes and misunderstandings about what goes on in the West. For example, there are all sorts of stereotypes about the lack of spirituality in the West.

Every time I go to Iran, I have to keep reminding people that that’s not the case, that spirituality and religion are still crucial to the average citizen in the West as well. Because of the lack of in-depth exposure to the day-to-day life of Westerners, people have false views of what is possible in Western countries. The notion that the streets are paved with gold and that you can just go and pick pieces up and so forth, those are the sort of misunderstandings that people have. Iranians in particular feel that the U.S. government has no other preoccupation than to just think about Iran and try to squeeze it in one way or another. You have to tell people that this is not what really goes on. Or regarding race relations in the U.S., there are quite exaggerated claims about the influence of Jewish lobbyists. As for secularism and democracy, it’s hard to come up with a catch-all theory that explains everything. Among Iranians, reactions are different—Iran is a divided polity, after all, and you have many that look at democracy and secularism as the way to go. They see, for example, how this instrumental use of religion by the new political elite in post-revolutionary Iran has taken something away from the inner meaning, from the sanctity of religion, per se. So people are advocating for democratic and secular government. Pluralist sentiments, especially with the younger generation, are very much alive. And of course, then you have others who view democracy and secularism as nothing but Trojan horses that the West employs. They say democracy, human rights, and women’s rights are just Trojan horses that the West attempts to use to deprive us of what is authentic, indigenous, and native to us.

How does the U.S. occupation of Iraq affect ordinary Iranians’ view of the U.S. and thus U.S. policy towards Iran?

Well, again, not being there, it is hard for me to say. But judging from what I read in the paper and what I see on Iranian TV, certainly the U.S. presence is not something that people are too excited about. Reports about the unleashing of these sorts of ethnic and religious conflicts in the region, or the destruction of holy Shiite sites, or the geographical proximity and the ease with which Americans can basically violate Iranian airspace, or the daily barrage of reportage that you get of the killings of innocent Iraqis by American soldiers—even if they’re accidental shootings and so forth—do not necessarily reassure people that the U.S. presence in Iraq is to their advantage. As the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, I think, so has the public mood in Iran in terms of viewing the U.S. presence in Iraq.

In Lebanon’s The Daily Star, you wrote that it is difficult for the United States to work with domestic Iranian opposition because “there is hardly any agreement within the Iranian opposition on how to change the regime. For dissidents inside Iran, money or endorsements from the United States are the kiss of death.” How can the United States engage Iranian reformists to effect change? Without a sole leader for the reform movement, like the role which ex-President Khatami played while in office, is reform currently possible?

I’m absolutely sure that any type of overt, direct support—for propaganda purposes, to reach out to Iranian reformists, or to beef up dissident movements as a way of regime change—is going to backfire. I think that’s absolutely not the way to proceed. Frankly, my recommendation is a much less sexy type of policy. I would say that you need to engage Iran and enable it to open up economically. Allow it to enter the WTO. Fundamental economic reforms that further consolidate the economic power of the middle class are how you will be able to ensure the future prospects of a reformist type of movement, and frankly, the gradual mellowing of the Iranian political scene. The policies that the U.S. has pursued have been extremely short-sighted and counter-productive. I would say to try to support nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, etc.

Do not try to put a political tag on it. Being more receptive to and having more ties—cultural, political, economic—to Iran is what’s going to pay dividends in the long-term, rather than what the U.S. has been doing for the last 30 years, which is a policy of sanctions and trying to impose deadlines and red tape that haven’t amounted to much at the end of the day. But of course, I know my policies wouldn’t go over well with the folks in Washington because they want short-term, sexy types of “solutions” where they can say: “Mission Accomplished.” As an academic, I have the luxury of thinking long-term, and seeing how these things can be counter-productive in the long-term.

But won’t economic support help Ahmadinejad? Much of the domestic criticism directed towards him deals with Iran’s economic problems, especially its oil shortages and rapidly increasing inflation. That was the biggest issue during the recent parliamentary elections. Wouldn’t the U.S. providing economic help to Iran strengthen conservatives instead?

That’s a very good question. You see, in social sciences, we have the phenomenon of the law of unintended consequences. I think this is exactly one of those cases. You’re right—the Achilles heel of the Iranian government, in many ways, is its handling of the economy. Right now, there are daily shortages of electricity in Iran, between two to four hours a day, even in Tehran. That should tell you that the economy is in shambles in many ways. There has been very little foreign direct investment in Iran; the aging infrastructure of the oil industry is in dire need of an infusion of money so that they can upgrade and update their equipment.

Iran needs to do much more by way of offshore drilling for oil, and it doesn’t have the technology on its own to do this. So the point is, in the short-term, economic aid can help to improve the lot of Ahmadinejad and so forth, but the unintended consequence would be that in the long-term, you are trying to help the flourishing of a middle class, whose standard of living has deteriorated rather sharply in the last thirty years. If the literature of political science tells us anything about democracy building and class structure, this is the class that you really need to try to beef up. And again, I think it would be advantageous for the Iranians—they would get something out of this, infrastructure, help, etc., and I believe people would be sophisticated enough to know to what extent these benefits were accomplishments of the Iranian government and to what extent they were due to the initiatives undertaken by Western countries. So I wouldn’t worry much about political milking of this issue if I were in Washington.

Entering Uncharted Waters

2009-03-03T14:48:00.001-08:00

Politic Staff Reporter

Fifteen women and girls in headscarves and dark-colored manteaus—knee-length, long-sleeved overcoats mandated by Iranian law—sat in plastic chairs in a government-run health clinic, their eyes looking expectantly at me behind thick layers of eyeliner and mascara. It was my first time speaking to them alone and my Farsi skills and nerves were not up to the task. I held up a condom and tried to remember the word for “lubricant.” Passing out condoms to sex workers and sterile needles to drug users was not what I was expecting from a summer internship in 2007 at the National Youth Assembly, an NGO that coordinated a project on disease prevention within government clinics in Mashhad, the second-largest city in

Iran. The popular image of the country—even to me, raised with knowledge of Iranian politics and culture and having visited many times—is one where the government’s conservative, religious ideology reaches into every corner of life. Many would expect that the theology behind the government’s most well known laws—against alcohol, revealing clothing, and homosexuality—would naturally seep into its disease-prevention strategy as well.

And for years it did. For the first 20 years of the Islamic Republic, drug users were dealt with harshly. The government’s punitive approach dated from the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when newly empowered clerics decided to banish the corrupting ‘Western’ influence of drug use. Drug addicts were given six months to kick their habits, and those who could not were arrested and jailed.

Results were predictable: Iranian prisons overflowed with addicts, and HIV and hepatitis outbreaks among prisoners were common. A generation of Iranian youth coming back from the 1988 Iran-Iraq War was welcomed with a jobless economy hobbled by international sanctions. The veterans’ disillusionment and hopelessness threatened to swell the ranks of addicts, who could in turn spread disease to their wives and children. Forced to face reality, in the mid-1990s the Ministry of Health began to fund methadone-treatment programs for drug addicts and encourage the distribution of sterile needles to prevent the spread of disease. These prevention techniques are still used today. The changes, however, were not inevitable. In fact, it was only an active, sophisticated civil society that was able to convince politicians and the clergy to embrace a more pragmatic approach, according to Kaveh Khoshnood, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has done infectiousdisease research in Iran.

“They were able to begin to get heard and present alternatives, saying this addiction is a medical issue, a public-health issue,” Khoshnood said. “That’s the perspective that actually gained support and made it all the way to high-ranking government officials.”

Such a harm-reduction approach certainly seems out of place in a theocracy. It assumes that since “sinful” acts like drug use and prostitution will always exist, it’s better to reduce the dangers inherent in such risky behaviors instead of attempting to purge society through moralizing.

The juxtaposition, however unexpected, has worked. The harm-reduction approach has been applied inside the country by a constellation of homegrown Iranian groups, government agencies, and international aid workers. These agents distribute sterile needles and methadone and educate at-risk individuals in an attempt to cut down the country’s HIV infections. Government clinics in every province offer free testing, and if someone is diagnosed, he or she receives free antiretroviral drugs from the government. It would seem that the Islamic Republic has embraced a modern, pragmatic approach to disease prevention that could begin to limit the number of new infections and save the lives of those already infected.

In return for holding its nose and enacting progressive policies, the government has received extensive praise from the United Nations and other agencies and breathless, positive international news stories that counter coverage of oppression in the country or its nuclear ambitions.

“We have realized that an addict is a social reality,” Muhammad-Reza Jahani, vice president of the committee coordinating the government’s response to drug addiction and trafficking, told the New York Times in June. “We don’t want to fight addicts; we want to fight addiction.”

But a closer examination of Iran’s public health approach indicates an inconsistent set of policies that embrace care for one group—drug users—while insisting that the sexual behavior that could lead to HIV infection is a moral failing.

Midway through June 2007, I sat in a bare room in the house-turned-office that served as the NGO’s Mashhad headquarters, copy editing the English version of our program brochure. The doctor who ran our summer project, Vahid Nobahar, and his assistant strode in, returning from a meeting with government authorities. As they sat cooling off from the dusty Mashhad heat, they vented about the officials that had urged them to focus less on condom use and more on abstinence, especially in the printed materials that we distributed to young women and injecting drug users. They had managed to stave off the officials’ objections once more, but said the government’s protests had become more pronounced since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded the more liberal Mohammad Khatami as president in 2005.

And as recently as 2002, the Iranian Center for Disease Control’s pamphlet on disease prevention stated, without any mention of condoms, “The best way to avoid AIDS is to be faithful to moral and family obligations and to avoid loose sexual relations. Trust in God in order to resist satanic temptations.”

The pamphlet and Nobahar’s experience are indicative of the government’s unwillingness to acknowledge sexual realities that affect the country’s health profoundly. This delusion gained international notoriety during President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University last year, where he made the claim that Iran has no homosexuals.

Khoshnood believes the government’s more tolerant stance is limited to drug users because drug use—and especially opium use—is a more acceptable and ingrained vice, dating back hundreds of years in the Iranian social landscape. Opium, of course, is widely available from nearby Afghanistan, and despite the Iranian government’s efforts, which include a 13-foot-high wall along the two countries’ border, tons of the drug still get in each year. Premarital sex, on the other hand, is a much more resilient taboo. Women regularly have hymen-repair surgeries to present a virginal front for husbands, and Nobahar told me that many Iranian youth prefer anal sex to preserve their “virginity.” Knowing they cannot get pregnant this way, many women do not bother with condoms, leaving them especially vulnerable to infection.

Laila, a very pretty girl listening to my presentation on condoms, was a seventeen year-old sex worker engaged to be married. She, like the other girls, came to the clinic for basic health services. Laila raised an arm laden with stacks of gold bangles and asked me how old I was.

“Nineteen,” I answered.

“Do you have a fiancé?”

“No.”

“Be careful! You’ll get too old,” she advised.

I held out the condom for Laila and the other girls to pass around and feel its texture, and started explaining how they could convince their partners to use them, techniques particularly important in a society where men often have the upper hand. The girls blushed and turned down the condom. Even sex workers in Iran want to avoid confronting the sticky issue of sexual health at all costs.

These are the kinds of challenges and cultural roadblocks ingrained in Iranian civil society that make it extremely difficult—albeit by no means impossible—to have a robust, realistic public health policy.

Government and the media can defeat cultural taboos if enough political will exists to make it happen. Millions of Iranians have illegal satellite dishes that stream in American and Middle Eastern channels and provide Iranian youth—70 percent of the population—their cue for popular culture and fashion trends. The government could harness that power through public service announcements or ever-popular soap operas, an approach that has affected health behavior for the better in dozens of countries for decades. For example, after a Kenyan soap opera discussed family planning in 1987, contraceptive use in the country increased by 58 percent. That approach, of course, will only be taken if the government first recognizes the appeal of Western culture and legalizes the popular satellite dishes.

It’s unfair, however, to place all the blame on the government.

Culture and tradition, independent of politics, play a huge role in propagating a society’s schizophrenic view of sex. Though public policy can encourage safe sex, an open attitude toward sexual health can never be achieved without the efforts of millions of Iranian parents. Members of this older generation, who bore the abuses of the Shah and led and lived through a revolution only to fight a bloody war with a neighboring country for the next eight years, can be forgiven if they didn’t prioritize the ‘sex talk’ when raising their kids, today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings. Iranian culture, with its obsession with family reputation and status, leaves no room to acknowledge that youth will inevitably go astray of strict religious edicts, and better be able to do so with the tools that will keep them safe. So while Iranian parents worry about what the neighbors will think, on the streets of Iran’s cities and towns their teenaged sons and daughters are confronting the opportunities, risks, and realities of sex on a daily basis.

Some say the Iranian government could only bear to face the reality of premarital and homosexual relations if there develops a transmission crisis analogous to that of drug users and HIV in the mid-1990s.

“It’s much more difficult for the Iranian government to put out a report saying ‘We have tens of thousands of women selling themselves on the street,’” Khoshnood said. “That is so against what the Islamic Republic is supposed to be.”

To be sure, Iran can boast that it is a model for other Middle Eastern countries in how to attack the HIV epidemic. It is one of only eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa that has signed on to a UN commitment to fight HIV/AIDS, and Iran’s uneven focus on drug users has at least abolished a great deal of stigma that still clouds prevention efforts throughout the Arab world. The fact that my group was even allowed to broach the subject of sexual health is a tribute to a legacy left by an active civil society and forward-thinking clerics who years ago put their stamp of approval on a harmreduction approach to AIDS prevention. But the country, and particularly the government, has a long way to go if it wants to prevent a major outbreak of HIV. The current HIV/AIDS rate is relatively low, but the 2008 UNAIDS report estimates there are about 86,000 people in the country living with the disease today, compared to 46,000 in 2001. Iran’s geographic position as a drug route between Afghanistan and Europe and its young population put it at special risk for an epidemic. Khoshnood believes that much of the progress made over the past decade in Iran’s public health policy is fragile and reversible, especially if proven methods of disease prevention are politicized and questioned. Recent events prove him right. This summer two of the architects of the country’s current harm-reduction policy toward drug users, brothers Arash and Kamiar Alaei, were arrested and charged by the Iranian government with “plotting to overthrow the government,” according to Iran’s E’temad newspaper. Human rights groups have called for the brothers’ release, claiming that their arrest is purely political and not grounded in their work, which was conducted openly.

“It’s basically dirty politics at its best,” Khoshnood said.

“The message is ‘Don’t work with NGOs in Iran.’ Unfortunately a lot of my American colleagues are freaked out.”

Such a chill effect could eliminate any chances for a diplomacy centered on public health. Though it may seem that public health is insignificant considering the other obstacles in the way of constructive Iranian-American relations—nuclear proliferation, human rights, and U.S. involvement in the Middle East come to mind—consider that in 2006, the Alaei brothers met with their American counterparts in Washington, D.C. at the first such State Department-approved meeting since the overthrow of the Shah. Kamiar Alaei recently graduated from the Harvard School of Public Health, and each summer took a cadre of students to Iran to research HIV/AIDS.

This kind of cultural and political exchange becomes incredibly unlikely if American foundations, previously willing to fund research and exchange with Iran, are afraid their grantees will be randomly arrested. Worse, Iranian activists could themselves decide that the risk of punishment is too great and decline to challenge cultural norms and stigma on a host of issues.

A few weeks after I arrived in Mashhad, I helped guide officials from UNAIDS on a tour of our prevention operations in the city, including the “Positive Club,” our peer-support program for HIV-positive drug users. Since my English was better than that of the doctors and other interns, I acted as a translator.

One man, in his mid-forties but prematurely aged, wanted me to tell his story to one of the officials. He was a manual laborer with a fifth-grade education who had managed to quit four addictions—heroin, cigarettes, hashish, and pills—after he learned he was HIV-positive, dulling the pain of withdrawal by banging his head against a wall. Now he travels around Iran, speaking to current drug users about his experience.

“Just tell her,” he urged, “that a positive diagnosis is not the end.”

Health Care Without Risks

2009-03-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

Conducted by June Torbati

Jacob Hacker earned his Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 2000. He published his first book on the Clinton administration’s failed proposal for universal healthcare as a graduate student in 1997. His “Healthcare for America” plan is the basis for Senator Barack Obama’s health care proposal, and Hacker has written on healthcare issues for the opinion pages of almost every major American newspaper and magazine.

What are your thoughts on McCain’s healthcare plan? Would the $2500 per-person or $5000 per-couple/family credit be enough to get coverage, considering that the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that the average health insurance premium in 2008 topped $12,000, with employers picking up three quarters of that amount?

I think it’s a really bad proposal. And it hasn’t garnered McCain a whole lot of support—either among voters, who seem to trust Obama a lot more on health care, or among business leaders, who came out against the proposal recently. Business leaders fear that it would cause more employers to drop health insurance.

The plan is premised on the idea that people should not get health insurance from their employers. Most of the estimates show there will be very little effect on the number of people who lack health insurance, but it would lead to a big change in where people get coverage. Depending on your assumptions on how price-sensitive people are, maybe 20 million people, 1 in 8 Americans with employer-sponsored coverage, would get shifted into the individual market, where coverage is lot more costly and a lot harder to find if you have any need for it.

I guess you could say this might be a good policy for people who are young and healthy, but even they are going to have problems if they have health problems in the future. I don’t think McCain has had any traction with the proposal because, frankly, it just isn’t workable and it’s not going to achieve the goal of broader coverage. It’s a real loser.

Obama has claimed that his health care plan would cut costs to families by about $2500 a year. Specifically, Obama said the use of electronic health records (EHRs) would create up to half of those savings. Could Obama’s healthcare plan really do much to speed up the adoption of EHRs, or reap such large savings from it?

No one knows exactly how much savings he could achieve through these different measures. I think what they mean with the $2,500 figure is the average savings to the system as a whole, savings which ultimately come back to us in lower taxes, premiums, and out-of-pocket health costs. The average savings per person would be something like $625.

The reality is that under reform different people would get different amounts. People who are really healthy and have very generous employer sponsored coverage now might receive fewer savings than people who are less healthy or low-income or don’t have generous employer sponsored coverage.

The idea is that Obama’s proposal will create systemic savings and the question is really how the savings would be distributed. The important thing is that the proposal is built on the principle that everyone will be made better off by controlling the growth of health costs.

One of the big issues with our present system is that we have a lot of problems with lack of coordination of care and duplicative treatment and missed treatment. Some of the things that Obama has put in this proposal are very concrete in terms of how they would fix these problems to save money. The evidence is also strong that the proposal would reduce administrative costs.

Over the long term, health care costs are the biggest threat to our government budgets, family budgets, and our business budgets. Obama has realistic ideas about how to slow the growth of health care costs. Without standing behind any particular element as the key to cost control, I think the overall package has a lot of good ideas for how we could control costs.

What about the “Iron Triangle” in health care—the idea that when it comes to cost, access, and quality, you can’t improve one without worsening one or both of the other two?

I just think the idea is false. We spend an enormous amount, far more than any other nation but we don’t seem to be getting dramatically better quality out of that. Countries that have universal health insurance have had better success at controlling costs.

We’re the only country in which people are at severe risk of medical bankruptcy. That suggests that while there are certainly tradeoffs—if you cut spending too much, you might impair quality, for example—we really are so far below the grade on all three of these dimensions that we’ve got a way to go before we start worrying about the iron triangle.

What are the biggest differences between your Health Care for America plan and Senator Obama’s proposal?

They’re very similar, but there are three main differences:

One, my proposal would apply to all employers. All employers would have to either provide basic coverage or help pay for coverage through a new national insurance pool. Obama has said his proposal would exempt small employers. Two, my proposal requires that all Americans show proof of coverage; his only requires that children be covered. Three, Senator Obama has said that he would expand Medicaid and SCHIP [State Children’s Health Insurance Program], and under my proposal people younger than 65 who receive benefits from those program would get coverage either through their employers or the new national pool. Under Obama’s proposal they would keep Medicaid and SCHIP.

In the face of the impending financial crisis, do you think it will be possible to have meaningful health care reform? Note that both of the candidates have evaded the question of what they would give up in terms of spending in their first term.

Certainly what’s going on with the overall economy is going to make health reform a more pressing concern for America. It highlights for people how tied their health insurance is to their job and their pocketbook. It certainly makes reform more urgent.

Health care reform is on balance going to be producing savings. It certainly will cost money to get it started. The federal government is going to be taking costs pressures off families and employers.

In the long term, it’s the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending that poses the biggest risk for our budget, and these reforms have real promise to restrain that growth over time.

Health care is a grave economic threat to Americans. Our economy would be much stronger if people weren’t constantly worried about losing health coverage if they changed or lost their jobs. There are some aspects of reform you might have to put off and you might have to go more slowly. But you can make a very strong case that [reform] is an even more urgent priority now.

What is it about the American political system that has prevented universal coverage? Do you think the American focus on individualism and self-sufficiency stands in the way of universal coverage?

I think it should be kept in mind that this proposal is not turning upside down the entire U.S. health insurance system. It moves us from a system with employers solely are responsible for people younger than 65 who are not poor toward a system where employers, the government and individuals all have responsibilities and rights. It’s moving to a system of shared responsibility.

This is the most realistic way to get to universal health insurance. One of the principal reasons we’ve seen failure is that we came to rely on employers to provide these benefits between the 1930s and 1960s. When the federal government finally had the political opportunity to step in, the only realistic option, our leaders believed, was to fill in the gaps [with Medicare and Medicaid], because most non-elderly Americans had insurance from their employers.

The political challenge today therefore is not just to get over fears of government but to fight fear with fear—the fear that reform will make your coverage worse with the very real possibility that your good coverage is going to disappear if there isn’t reform. You have to say to people who are happy with what they have, “Look, your coverage may seem good now but it’s rising in costs every year and it may not be there down the line.”

More important, you have to fight fear with hope. Not only do we have to show people that there are risks in our present system even if you have coverage, but we also need to provide people with a simple, clear, compelling picture of what reform will look like. I think that Obama’s taken the right approach, which is to offer something that builds on the present system but fixes its most glaring defects.

A fundamental problem with the American health care system is its high costs. These costs have been attributed to the high rate of specialized compared to primary-care doctors, as well as our emphasis on and demand for high-technology medicine that leaves little money for cheap, preventive primary care. Does Obama’s plan include any methods of reducing costs, other than increased information technology? How difficult would it be to change these more entrenched aspects of our system?

The way our financing is done today really drives a lot of these features. Financing is so fragmented that there is no payer who has incentive or ability to try to get value for dollar. By providing better payments under this new national program and Medicare to primary-care physicians, I think that over time we’re going to see a move back towards a more primary care-oriented system.

As far as high-tech goes, I don’t think that we’re as off the charts as you might think . Many countries also have heavy emphasis on high-tech care too. But we certainly spend much more on specialists than other countries and our primary-care infrastructure is in crisis.

The agenda for change that we need is one that says we’re not going to solve all problems in the system overnight. I think the most pressing problem is that there is rampant insecurity. We need to protect against catastrophic costs and provide good affordable coverage to everyone, but leave flexibility in any new framework to try to figure out how medicine should evolve and how our delivery system should evolve. You don’t want to have a system that locks in a particular set of strategies. You want patients and doctors to be partners in improving care and determining the direction of care.

Does your plan require overturning the stipulation currently in effect, that the government cannot negotiate for lower prescription drug prices with drug companies?

I think it’s totally ridiculous, and Obama does too. The Medicare drug benefit had two elements of it that should be among the first things that should be reversed. One is the fact that it doesn’t allow Medicare to provide the drug benefit directly or bargain for drug prices and two is the subsidies for the Plan D (prescription drug benefit) plans. Those subsidies mean 12% greater payments than the costs. It doesn’t make any sense.

Senator Obama has mentioned you as someone he would like to see in his administration. Would you accept a position if offered?

The only way to realistically answer questions like these is to say that you would of course consider any offer a huge honor. For me what’s really important is that we have major action on this issue. I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to ensure all Americans have access to health care.

What is your opinion on the political discussion of healthcare issues during this election cycle?

I think the print media has been fairly good this cycle, especially after the primary campaign was over. They grasped the major differences, and the commentary has been fair and independent. I don’t think the broadcast news has been as good. They have just not been as interested in the policies of the candidates. They’re really just interested in the horse race aspect of the campaign. But this isn’t an issue you can just cover as a political food fight. You have to really look at the details of what’s being proposed and how they might affect Americans. You have to have people reporting on these issues who know how health care works. I don’t know what to expect this time around. Assuming we have another big debate there has to be a big effort on the part of those interested in this issue to educate journalists to see their responsibilities clearly. Their responsibility is not to be an advocate for any particular point of view but to clearly show how the competing proposals will affect ordinary Americans.

A Winning Strategy in Iran

2009-03-03T14:44:00.001-08:00

By Sam Yellen

General Paul E. Vallely retired in 1991 from the US Army as Deputy Commanding General, US Army, Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. General Vallely graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned in the Army in 1961 serving a distinguishing career of 32 years in the Army. General Vallely has co-authored Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror and War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World.

Do you see Iran in its current state as a problem for the United States?

If you look at it globally it’s a problem for the Middle East, it’s a problem for the world because of the goals that they are trying to pursue. It’s a problem for many, it’s a problem for Iraq, it’s a problem for Israel, it’s a problem for the rest of the world—they’re a problem child.

Do you think it deserves the attention of the United States? How does it compare to the United States’ concerns with Iraq and Afghanistan?

They’re all very important. They’re both different situations. Of course they’re neighboring countries. You have Tehran which is the center of international terrorism, supporting international terrorism. You’ve got the tribal lands in Pakistan just across from Afghanistan which are al-Qaida training areas and the center of al-Qaida and Taliban operations. That’s the eastern side of Afghanistan and on the other side you have the problem of Iran and its support of international terrorism and its pursuing of nuclear weapon capability.

In your article in the Washington Times on June 30, 2008, you suggested that the U.S. should support the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK) an Iranian opposition group that is part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). How are they different from a group like al-Qaida?

They are very different. They are dedicated to freedom and democracy. They are not dedicated to spreading radical Islam. They are not radical Islamists. I know them very well. We’ve done exhaustive studies on the Iran Policy Committee. We’ve done the most in-depth studies on the MEK of anybody. We have met with the E.U. members of British Parliament and have done exhaustive research that reflects that they are the best organized Iranian opposition organization in the world.

When the Bush Administration started the Global War on Terror, it was portrayed that the United States would go after terrorists and nations that support them around the world. Do you think that policy should be amended so that terrorist groups of a certain ideology are targeted more than others?

Absolutely, it should because it’s more than a religion. It is actually a social-cultural organization. When you look at radical Islam, it’s not just a religion. It’s a social and economic type of movement.

When choosing which groups to support, what do you think is most important in deciding whether to back them over their national governments?

I think we should always stand for organizations like the MEK, which stand for freedom and democracy in opposition to repressive regimes whether they be in Africa, the Middle East or anywhere else. I have supported President Bush even though I have disagreed with many of his strategies. The idea that we should stand for freedom and democracy, I think, is a good goal for the U.S. That does not mean we can bring freedom and democracy to the entire Middle East or to other cultures immediately, but we need to take a stand on that because all men, as we well know, seek freedom and seek not being repressed by their governments. That is the kind of strategy that we need to seek and stand firmly behind.

Given the history of U.S. involvement in regime change in Iran, why do you think the U.S. could be successful if they helped the MEK this time?

Ninety percent of the intelligence information we get on what is going on inside Iran and the nuclear development program has been provided by Ali Reza Zavarzadeh who is part of the NCRI. Almost everything that we get that has been confirmed and verified has come from the MEK, mostly from the 3,500 MEK who are in Iraq in Ashraf City. Their other headquarters is north of Paris. Through that organization they have been able to provide us information which is key to combating terrorism and cross border operations into Iraq. It is their existing network that makes the MEK strong in Iran. It is their organization, not only in Iran but also in Ashraf City inside Iraq and also their network in Europe just north of Paris. They are very well organized. They are not as well-funded as they should be. But the senior leadership of the MEK is very good. A lot of these members came out after the Shah was deposed in 1979. They have some very senior and well educated leadership and one of the best-organized opposition groups in the world.

Do you think that the U.S. is doing all that it can do to prevent the spread of extremism, especially the spread of extremism and terrorism through Iran?

No, we are not, for a number reasons. First, we lack an overall Middle East Strategy. There is no identifiable Middle East strategy.

In Afghanistan, we have international terrorism that crosses all borders. They recognize no established borders. Iran particularly recognizes no borders as they traffic funds, explosives, and military equipment, not only to the troops in Iraq but also to Hezbollah, to destabilize the government in Lebanon. Yet we restrict our commanders in many ways.

For example, General Petraeus in Iraq cannot go across the border into Iran and take out known Iranian Revolutionary Guard locations or the factories that are producing explosive ordinances which kill and wound U.S. forces in Iraq as well as innocent civilians in Iraq. That’s all fostered and supported by the government of Iran. Unless you bloody their nose, they will continue to try to outmaneuver the West to establish what we call the hegemonic power of the Middle East that Iran wants to be. They want to be the power over all of the countries in the Middle East and they know they can achieve that if they gain nuclear weapons.

In your article in the Washington Times, you said that now is the time to continue the third option: unshackling the Iranian opposition groups. Do you think that supporting Iranian opposition groups is preferable to a conventional military encounter?

As of now it would be part of an overall strategy. The Iranian opposition’s forces know they can’t do it alone. They know they need assistance to achieve regime change in Iran. That can be assistance from other countries but we also know that Israel may take those steps shortly to take out specific targets within Iran. We could see that happen sometime within the next 90 to 120 days in Iran.

What do you think the U.S. response should be if Israel were to launch an attack on Iran?

Support it.

What do you think of the controversy surrounding the resignation of Admiral William Fallon. Do you think the administration may have been trying to draw Iran into a conflict?

No, I think it was several things. I was all for Admiral Fallon being fired. I don’t think he was a strong commander. I don’t think he understood the Iranian situation to take action to assist General Petraeus by hitting selected targets in Iran which were transporting and executing operations against our forces in Iraq. I think Admiral Fallon should have been replaced.

As we transition to a new administration, what kind of policies toward Iran would you like to see from the next president?

I would like to see an established Middle East policy that deals with Iran. We know sanctions are not going to work. They’ll hurt them but they won’t work. We know Russia is not our friend and in the end. And in the end will support Iran in any way they can and we know that they’ve assisted them in the development of their nuclear weapons program. We know that they have recently sold them 350-400 million dollars for missile systems. We look at that whole situation developing between Russia and Iran. The Iranians had a meeting about two weeks ago which was a celebration with Bashar al-Assad of Syria about how they have been able to outmaneuver the West, and to continue with the development of their nuclear weapons program.

They are very happy with the appeasers in the West not only in Europe but also in the United States. And when you have great appeasers like Condoleezza Rice, they will take advantage of them.

The new administration needs to be firm. They cannot tolerate any more cross border activities from Iran into Iraq or Afghanistan or they’ll continue to outmaneuver and extend their power, as well as their resource support of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank. You’ll continue to see deteriorating situations in those areas. And of course with the support of Hezbollah in Lebanon they’ve basically taken control of Lebanon now.

The United States and Iran through the Ages

2009-03-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

An Interview with Gary Sick

Conducted by Maggie Goodlander

Professor Gary Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick is the author of All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran and October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. He currently serves as a researcher and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Did advisors and key players in the Ford Administration imagine how dramatically U.S.- Iranian relations would change? In 1974 or 1975 could anyone have predicted that such a large-scale Iranian revolution would occur?

The simple answer is no. No one in the government—even leaders in Iran—were astonished by how it evolved and how the Shah’s who security apparatus collapsed. There is a book called The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran that actually examines all the conflicting theories of revolution that have been applied to Iran and examines them on the basis of a thorough review of what information was available at the time. It demonstrates well that the Iranian revolution was a surprise to everybody; that it didn’t actually become inevitable until very late in the day. There was a tipping point in the fall of 1978, and up until that point it was very possible that the shah would survive the challenge. Once that tipping point passed, it was all downhill for the shah. I think everyone who witnessed it was shocked by how quickly it went and how totally the shah and his very impressive security apparatus were incapable of responding to the challenge.

How does the Iranian Revolution play into the Iranian national narrative? How do moderate Iranians who oppose the current regime view the events of 1979?

In answering that, you have to realize that people’s views change dramatically over time. I think most of the people in Iran did not really expect the Shah to be overthrown or a new revolutionary regime—much less an Islamic-oriented regime—until September 1978. Most people were just going about their business and didn’t anticipate how big this was going to be. As the revolution grew, a great many people from all walks of life—in Iran and outside of Iran—combined to support the idea of the revolution.

People who we might call moderates or centrists saw this as a move towards greater democracy and human rights, and away from the rule of the monarchy. Those people took to the streets and in some cases even risked their lives for the sake of the revolution.

There were some very strange cases. For example, when I was on the National Security Council during that time, a lot of people who had been in Iran came to see me. One afternoon, a member of the Jewish Agency, an organization responsible for protecting Jews who are threatened in parts of the world and helping them escape to Israel—came to see me and said that he had just come from Iran. This was in the fall of 1978. He sat on the sofa in my office and I remember vividly his recounting that he had spoken with the leaders of the Jewish community in Tehran—this was a very large Jewish community comprised of about fifty or sixty thousand Jews—and how the children of Jewish leaders were out marching in the streets for Khomeini. He couldn’t believe it. The rest of the Jewish community outside Iran was very concerned about what this might mean to support fundamentalist Islamic rule. But many young Jewish people in Iran were caught up in the enthusiasm for the revolution.

People’s views about the revolution at that time were remarkable supportive, even in places that you would least expect it. That was certainly not universal. As the revolution over, people who had been proponents of greater democracy, human rights, women’s rights were thrown out of that system and marginalized; people like Yazar Kamanzi, who had promoted the idea of the revolution as a democratic movement, were marginalized. With this, a lot of people’s opinions began to change, and many centrist opinions began to shift against the revolution. There were a lot of committed monarchists who opposed the revolution from the start. A lot of people who were in favor of the revolution had a change of heart and decided that was not what they had in mind at all. Inside Iran, it’s far more complicated. People who lived through the revolution suffered a huge, chaotic breakdown of the government and its operations. They fought a war for eight years, and they have been subjected to far more control of their personal lives. It’s not that there is a revolutionary movement again or a burgeoning counter-revolution movement, but there is huge disillusionment with what the revolution has produced.

The revolution has done some really good things. They brought pipe gas to rural areas that never had it before, there are schools in villages that had never seen schools, there are roads to towns that weren’t there. There is television throughout the country. Going to college is much more feasible for people of all walks of life and all areas of the country. Their healthcare system has actually improved dramatically.

So there are a number of things that the Islamic revolution has achieved, but it’s been at a cost.

There are a lot of people inside Iran—although they’ve seen what revolution looks like and don’t want to go through it again—who are just disillusioned about where they are. A lot of people I think just want to get on with their lives at this stage. That’s the place where the present regime has a real problem. On one hand, it’s not producing great economic benefits for the country, but at the same time it’s cracking down more and more because they see this opposition and apathy growing amidst the Iranian people. The two together have undercut their legitimacy. This is a very complicated situation, but I think the key here is that this is dynamic—attitudes don’t stay fixed in one place.

Even people who were part of the group of students who took over the American embassy—people who were committed to the revolution and to clerical rule—have in many cases changed their views and become outspoken opponents of the regime to the extent of actually getting thrown in jail. So it’s a moving target and the revolution is not something that is black or white or good or bad—it’s something that is evolving and changing over time.

Similarly, how does the Iran Hostage Crisis play into the modern Iranian narrative? Do Iranians remember the hostage-taking with pride, as a moment when Iran brought the most powerful nation in the world to its knees, or it is viewed differently?

At the time, it was a point of pride in Iran. People marched in the streets in favor of it. Though some of it was engineered by the government—people were brought in for demonstrations and the like, but much of it was sincere. Khomeini, who was of course the leader at the time, called it the second Iranian Revolution. In that sense, what he felt was being accomplished and his underlying reason for keeping the crisis going as long he did was that he really wanted to break any kind of relationship with the United States. He saw the U.S.-Iran relationship as one of dependency and he felt that Iran needed to break away from it totally. The hostage crisis provided a political opportunity for him to get his own domestic agenda passed, which he did against growing odds at the time; and secondly, to break off any contacts or sense of dependency on the United States. I think those were shared by a lot of Iranians. Again, lots of Iranians had very different views—there were a lot of Iranians who were appalled and ashamed that a country which called itself civilized would invade a foreign embassy and hold hostages in that way over such a long period of time.

For many Iranians, this was truly unacceptable. Basically today, most Iranians have simply forgotten about it—it’s not a big deal in Iran. It’s not something that people talk about. Though they go through the ritual of remembering the taking of the embassy each year, it is not a significant memory in the Iranian consciousness. I would say the average Iranian hardly ever thinks about it. Though Iran has forgotten about it and put it nearly completely out of their minds, it has never been forgotten in the United States at all and continues to be at the very heart of U.S. policy with regard to Iran. It has posed many problems domestically as America forms its policy toward Iran. It has shaped U.S. attitudes towards Iran so dramatically that if anyone who says a good word about Iran or talks about engaging with Iran is immediately risking the label of being ‘Soft on Terrorism’ or ‘Soft on Iran’ or ‘An Appeaser.’ It has prevented the United States from progressing

in a political sense.

If you think about it, the Vietnam War was unfolding at the same time as the Iranian Revolution. More than 50,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam—it was a terrible war with disastrous consequences that affected American politics from one end to another. But today we have full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, even though it is a communist government. We do business with them and American prisoners of war go over there and revisit where they were held captive. In Iran, we have no diplomatic relations at all and there is still deep division over whether we should even talk to the government.

I think this goes back to the hostage crisis; it has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on America’s psyche. It has been and remains slow to heal.

What are the most pressing challenges to a healthy U.S.-Iranian relationship?

There are many, many challenges; first, there are several facts that simply have to be acknowledged. Iran is the largest, most populous, and one of the most economically important countries in terms of its oil and gas reserves in the Persian Gulf. It dominates one entire side of the Persian Gulf and one side of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 60 percent of the world’s exported oil and gas go. It is enormously important.

The United States and Iran disagree with one another about many issues. It’s not just that the United States has been scarred by the hostage crisis, the Iranians have a domestic political problem also because their revolution was oriented around opposition to the United States. This idea of chanting ‘death to America’ at every major public event that Iran holds has soured Iranian domestic politics. Someday, those feelings and emotions will have to be resolved. That doesn’t mean that they are just going to vanish one day, but I think we’re actually seeing a time when both the United States and Iran know they cannot function without one another. The United States cannot have a coherent policy in the Persian Gulf without having contacts with Iran and dealing with Iran on a number of regional issues. Iran cannot have a coherent policy in the region without having some contact or relationship with the United States, which is in fact the most powerful country in the Persian Gulf. We have the largest footprint in the Gulf of any country. Iran can’t ignore that, and we can’t ignore them. We are going to find a way to begin to deal with one another.

How has the Bush Administration fared in its policy toward Iran?

In the last year, the Bush administration has begun making some significant changes in U.S. policy. We were very involved in this latest proposal to Iran that offered a package of benefits that was presented to them by three members of the Security Council and three European powers recently.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed that letter to Iran and the number three diplomat at the State Department was said to continue to participate in the meeting that was held subsequently. That was a major step. The United States will have diplomatic relations with Iran someday. We will begin to deal with some of the issues that separate us and bring us together. We do share a number of fundamental interests in the region – you can either focus entirely on the negative side or you can look at the positive side of things and build on it. It’s going to have to be a mixture of both of those; we can’t forget the negative things that happened with the Iranians, but we can’t ignore the positive side of things. At this stage, I think we are beginning to experiment on both sides with this idea of strengthening relations. This will, no doubt, be a poignant challenge for the next administration.

What do Iranians hope to achieve from nuclearization? Do they seek national security or regional sovereignty? What are their underlying intentions?

Looking back, Iran began seeking nuclear capability under the days of the shah. In fact, I was present in Tehran with President Carter in the last full year of the Shah’s reign when he agreed to sell the Shah seven nuclear reactors. This idea had been approved quite explicitly by the Ford administration years earlier. So, the idea of developing nuclear power capability existed long before the Iranian Revolution, and the United States actually cooperated with that process. Of course then, as now, developing nuclear capability offered you the capacity of building a nuclear weapon. Today, people joke that if Japan wanted to, they could have a nuclear weapon in a long weekend. Other countries like Brazil or Taiwan are much further away from it, but if they decided, they needed to have a nuclear weapon, they could, using what they’ve got, get one rather quickly.

Iran is on its way to being a member of that forty nation club that has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon. Iran’s interests are vast. First, Iran actually does need alternatives to oil and gas. In the long run, their energy and electricity consumption have gone up dramatically. Today, Iran produces about four million barrels of oil per day, and it uses one and a half million barrels a day for domestic uses. It also imports refined products because it doesn’t’ have enough refineries to keep up with the demand for gasoline and diesel.

Turning to nuclear power is not strange. Iran has some of the greatest hydroelectric capabilities. Nuclear is not the only alternative energy source. It is 1.5 billion barrels of oil—we’re talking billions of dollars over a long period of time. Finding alternatives to the fossil fuel consumption in Iran is a very sensible thing to do.

Ultimately, Iran wants to be taken seriously as a regional power. They see that countries who have nuclear capability are taken much more seriously by the rest of the world. Iran wants to be taken seriously in the region and have a voice.

By replacing eliminating the Taliban in Afghanistan and replacing Saddam Hussein with a group of Shia political leaders, the United States has in fact increased Iran’s power and influence in the region. Iran is a much more powerful and influential country than it was five years ago, largelybecause of our actions.

Our misguided policy has affected Iran’s relations with other Arab nations, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—Iran’s overall influence is felt much further away. They are able to play a political game in the Levant area, providing support to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Those elements have in fact increased Iran’s influence and ability to extend its influence. This has grown rapidly in the last five years. Having nuclear power and being able to produce a weapon means a great deal.

In August of 1990 you famously wrote an opinion article in the New York Times raising concerns about the timing of the freeing of hostages in Tehran and Ronald Regan’s presidential campaign. Has any new information come to light in the last two decades that has changed your views on what happened?

That, of course, was hugely controversial. There were a lot of people who were extraordinarily angry with me for making that argument. In terms of new information, I have found evidence that both supports and negates my argument. From my perspective, and I’ve said this in the book, there’s no smoking gun. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, and as far as I’m concerned, it remains an open question. I think that’s where it will remain until we reach a breakthrough of some sort.

A conversation with the Iranians will perhaps shed light on what really happened. Either way—whether it supports or negates, I’d like to know what happened.

Republican Party Sinking into Deep Abyss

2009-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

By Bill Hare

Last night Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was interviewed by Morley Safer on "60 Minutes." Safer had begun by stating that Jindal had indicated he was not at this juncture ready for "prime time" in his response to Barack Obama's first presidential speech before both houses of Congress.

While Jindal revealed an upbeat side that so many growling, curmudgeonly figures of the Republican right have not been displaying, when the former Rhodes Scholar and boy wonder of Louisiana politics was asked to discuss what the future holds for his party, he segued into the same rationale as earlier delivered in his response to Obama.

In Jindal's speech the governor who was in office when the Katrina disaster occurred delivered the same scolding reference to the federal government as an enemy so prevalent among right wing Republicans, albeit with the kind of sunny tone associated with another major Republican figure.

Many pundits questioned Jindal's comment in view of the fact that federal government funds kept many Katrina victims alive.

Then, in the Sunday interview with Safer, Jindal dropped what many Republicans, with presumably the Louisianan as well, regard as the silver bullet that will lead to continuing party success.

Jindal mentioned Ronald Reagan as a model for Republican success. Is this real continuity for the twenty-first century?

At a time when most Americans according to all major national polls believe that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model of more national government to stimulate a shattered economy is the feasible road to traverse, we see a Republican spokesperson considered a major candidate for his party's presidential nomination in 2012 singing an ancient tune that was well borrowed when Reagan used it.

Reagan did nothing more than give a bright, cheery face and the professional delivery of a seasoned actor and public speaker to the failed "trickle down economics" theory that brought ultimate Depression after being followed by three Republican presidents in a row during a cycle from 1921 to 1933, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

At the same time, the smiling, congenial, albeit failed economic ideas, remains the sunny side of the Republican Party. The darker side was revealed by Allen Keyes and speakers at the recently concluded annual Conservative Political Action Committee Convention.

Keyes, no doubt still smarting from an overwhelming senatorial defeat against Obama in 2004, charged in a throwback to the vile McCarthy period that the nation's current president, replete with a better than 60 percent approval rating, is a "Communist" and that if he is not stopped that America as we know it will be destroyed.

In the same vein, Sean Hannity on his website ran a poll that played into the same kind of paranoiac posture exemplified by Keyes. Hannity's poll asked readers to vote on what kind of revolution they would prefer to come to America.

Cliff Kincaid, "media analyst" who has long proclaimed that a left wing media conspiracy is tearing at the fiber of America, told Republican Political Action Committee delegates that the nation's current chief executive was not born in America. This would make him ineligible to serve as president according to the U.S. Constitution.

This shameful deception was presumably put to rest last year when a copy of Obama's birth certificate, verifying that he was born in the U.S. state of Hawaii, was run on the World Wide Web. At that point even the staunchly rightist website World Net Daily accepted that reality.

Kincaid's tartly delivered comment served as the kind of red meat that CPAC delegates were eager to devour, however, despite an absence of verification. It was reminiscent of those days in the fifties when Senator Joe McCarthy would stand up in the Senate and proclaim the current number of Communists in the U.S. State Department, varying the figure repeatedly.

The idea is that you keep throwing mud and hope that some of it sticks. That appears to be the grand strategy emerging from the CPAC convention and shabby efforts as exemplified by Cliff Kincaid and Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina, who delivered his own wild appraisal in calling Obama "the world's best salesman of socialism."

Peace Could Produce Prosperity for Israel and Palestine!

2009-03-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

By Bob Kendall

U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, Democrat from Vancouver, Washington is a heroic maverick who visited the Palestinian Gaza Strip and is brutally honest when he tells what he saw immediately after the Gaza-Israeli War.

Danny Westneat in his article in the February 25 Seattle Times explains how Rep. Brian Baird's trip touched off foreign policy furor when he was one of the first officials in almost four years to visit the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

As the Gaza-Israeli War raged, strategically timed during the dying days of the George W. Bush administration, it was interesting to note how silent George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were, refusing to utter a word. Then President Elect Obama only said that if rockets were threatening his two daughters, he would do something.

Voices from the United Nations loudly objected to a UN ambulance being demolished. Human rights organizations throughout the world held marches, insisting that Israel with war planes bombing civilian centers was clearly disproportionate to the rocket response to the blockading of borders and the continued building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.

An 80-year-old Jewish woman appeared on a local television Seattle news program and quietly, but forcefully stated, "I am an 80-year-old Jewish woman and I have never seen anything like this," she shook her head sadly.

Westneat's article explained one U.S. representative's reaction to the devastation he saw as follows:

"What Israel did to Gaza was a Sherman's march type of destruction," Baird told me, essentially repeating what he said there. "There were whole neighborhoods leveled, 360 degrees everywhere you looked. Those were civilian areas, purposefully, utterly destroyed.

"Schools, hospitals, stores -- all rubble. These weren't accidental hits, they were deliberately targeted. I saw an ambulance crushed by an Israeli tank. How do you justify crushing an ambulance?"

Seattle Times reporter Danny Westneat asked Rep. Baird bluntly if he was accusing Israel of war crimes. Baird didn't reply yes or no, but responded with the following comment:

"What I am saying is you can't claim you are surgically hitting Hamas targets and then justify the absolute devastation in some of those neighborhoods. It was far worse than I had imagined. I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself.

"For telling his response to his first hand observation, a Jerusalem Post letter to the editors letter snapped, "What audacity, what chutzpa, what falsehoods.'

"Another letter writer blasted that Baird was a terrorist appeaser."

However, some U.S. websites hailed Rep. Baird for his courage and for speaking hard truths.

I have never heard anyone say they wanted to see either a Palestinian or an Israeli killed or suffer. What I have heard is disappointment that the killing continues and peace has eluded the Middle East Israelis and Palestinians.

In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer February 27, Aron Heller's article on U.S. Envoy George Mitchell and Israel's incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dated from Jerusalem revealed:

"Israel's next leader sat face to face Thursday with a man whose vision of the Israeli-Palestine relations is radically different from his own: the Obama administration's new Mideast envoy.

"Prime Minister Designate Benjamin Netanyahu thinks negotiations on Palestinian statehood are pointless. But Envoy George Mitchell wants Israel to resume negotiations to establish a Palestinian state.

"This is Mitchell's second Mideast visit since President Barack Obama took office last month. Hillary Clinton will make her first trip to the region next week as the new secretary of state.

"The attention follows Obama's promise to make Mideast peace a priority.

"'Thursday's meeting was positive and productive,' Netanyahu said, 'and the two still have a lot to talk about.'

"Mitchell made no comment. He promised a vigorous push for Israeli Palestinian peace on his first visit."

Aron Heller's article focuses on the real issues:

"Mitchell wants to press ahead with peace talks that would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu avoids any talk of Palestinian statehood and says peace efforts should focus on building up the Palestinian economy.

"Mitchell has urged a freeze of Jewish West Bank settlements, while Netanyahu says existing West Bank settlements must be allowed to expand."

If the U.S. continues funding to rebuild Gaza and support Israel, wouldn't it make common sense to insist Israel remove Jewish settlements on Palestinian land?

And the Hamas Palestinians must acknowledge and accept Israel's right to exist. Of course Hamas rockets into Israel must end and Israeli bomb attacks must end. Both Israel and Palestine must agree to do everything in their power to make each other's living conditions peaceful and prosperous.

If no peace agreement can be reached the U.S. should stop funding this long run bloody saga.

The recession demands that the U.S. taxpayer must stop being burdened borrowing billions from China to help fund the lack of a sensible resolution to this conflict.

The UN can take over where the U.S. leaves off.

An Under-Discussed potential tragedy in Detroit's Failure

2009-03-03T14:30:00.000-08:00

by CODY LYON
But there is another side that must be addressed with some sort of legislative mandate because if the auto world of Detroit is allowed to fail and sink behind the veil of protection that bankruptcy provides, the potential for great human tragedy becomes increasingly real for large groups of vulnerable Americans.

by CODY LYON

For some, thoughts of a massive financial bailout for the American Automobile industry strike chords of unease that some might say, reward the lack of innovation and enterprise that has been exhibited by some foreign auto manufacturing competitors. Futher, the auto industry, at least on the surface, has appeared to be in bed with 'big oil' by continuously producing oversized automobiles, ala SUV's and the like, cars that only encouraged a glutinous collective consumption of oil, as if that fossil fuel were pouring from spigots of plenty throughout the world. And, to top things off, executives flew in private jets to plea with leaders in Washington, furthering the epidemic of anger at what many see as a nation where greed and excess rule the day. And, its easy to understand why people subscribe to that image, thus, for vast swaths of America, it's become increasing hard to have sympathy for the legends of American industry and capital.

But there is another side that must be addressed with some sort of legislative mandate because if the auto world of Detroit is allowed to fail and sink behind the veil of protection that bankruptcy provides, the potential for great human tragedy becomes increasingly real for large groups of vulnerable Americans.

Last week, I entered had a conversation with a woman in Alabama, who's husband worked for many years in a union job at a public utility in that state. While she had misgivings about bailing a large industry like automakers, worrying that perhaps, it would lead to a rash of bailouts for other companies in trouble, or at least, calls for more, she also expressed deep worry about people in the same position she's in. She said, who's to say other companies might seek bankruptcy protection and legally do away with 'obligations' to its former employees.

Being the wife of a union retiree, she and her husband are able to survive in tough economic times thanks to a small pension and company healthcare benefits. This Alabama couple's drug costs would bankrupt many, and the struggle to pay bills, simply get by, is cushioned by the benefits negotiated and fought for years ago. Her husband and thousands of other's paid union dues, labor negotiations and more than a few days on picket lines which allowed them to earn a decent living and retire with a sense of security. While there's little chance a public utility will ever be in the same boat as automakers, there is still the fear among those people, those older union family Americans who thought contracts between the union and company was sacred and would always be there once they reached the golden years. The point is, in bankruptcy, the fear becomes that almost anything is possible, in this case, there is a chance that if the automakers of Detroit are allowed to fail, thousands, if not millions could see their pensions, health insurance and other benefits greatly diminished or simply go away because a judge or arbiter might rule the company can no longer afford to pay for them. That the company's survival is more important than the older people no longer producing product for profit.

It could be that this is the under-discussed potential tragedy of an auto-industry failure.

POLL: Americans Continue to Support Offshore Drilling

2009-03-03T14:15:00.000-08:00

Guest post by Steve Everley, Research Assistant at the American Enterprise Institute

Even with relatively low oil prices, the American people still strongly support offshore oil and gas drilling.

A new Harris Interactive poll, conducted February 13 – February 16, 2009, echoes the support Americans voiced before and after November’s elections: America favors offshore drilling for domestic oil and natural gas resources.

The poll found that 61% of Americans support drilling for oil and natural gas resources in the Outer Continental Shelf and the Gulf of Mexico. Only 26% of those polled opposed exploration and development of those resources.

Additionally, 57% would oppose regulations or laws that either delay or block domestic oil and natural gas production. Only 28% would support these regulations.

Specifically regarding Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s decision to delay the offshore drilling leasing process, 50% said they would “oppose delaying the offshore oil and gas drilling plan,” while only one-third of the respondents support Salazar’s decision.

Of those polled, 23% were Republicans, 37% were Democrats, and 33% were Independents, indicating that support for offshore drilling remains a tripartisan issue.

Choosing Kennedy would Send Wrong Message

2009-03-03T14:12:00.000-08:00

by Cody Lyon
Ultimately, picking Caroline Kennedy to succeed Hillary Clinton as Senator from New York might send a disturbing message to Americans, the world, but perhaps more importantly, to the children of New York state.

by CODY LYON

While the name Kennedy certainly evokes a sense of political reverence, respect and legacy, the family, despite remarkable political accomplishment, has also come to represent an American dynasty of sorts, the oft clichéd version of our royalty.' And while there's nothing wrong with Americans expressing affection for the pomp, circumstance even the tradition associated with royalty, there is reason to question, show concern or perhaps raise flags when one's family genes provide an untested individual with a potentially easy pathway to national political office.

History books teach us that the United States is a free and open Democracy that consists of government by and for the people. So, considering that `by' essentially equals votes, it might seem logical that in choosing New York's next Senator to succeed Hillary Clinton, the Governor might consider appointing an individual who has at least gotten votes for a public office, or consider tapping a public official who has earned more tangible political wings beyond being the daughter of one of the nation's most revered presidents and a member of our nation's often romanticized but powerful political dynasties.

Ultimately, picking Caroline Kennedy to succeed Hillary Clinton as Senator from New York might send a disturbing message to Americans, the world, but perhaps more importantly, to the children of New York state. It could, inadvertently cast doubt on the authenticity of the beautiful message the election of Barack Obama reaffirmed, that to good to be true truth that our parents tell us when we are small, that anyone, regardless of race, income and yes, name, can be elected to high office in the United States.

Choosing Caroline Kennedy as the Senator from New York, based on nothing more than her familial association, dilutes that message, and at least on the surface, seems to say like Royalty, position is indeed an attribute in American politics.

The Role of Hope, Fear and Race in the Election of the President

2009-03-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

by CODY LYON

The doubter kept saying that this is America, a place where hypocrisy and secrets were often reveal themselves in subtle fashions. He charged that America was still a place where inequity could be measured along racial and class lines and that it was on full display in policy and even in the most mundane activities of day to day life.

by CODY LYON

On the sunny, crisp and final Monday of October 2008, three friends met at around 1 p.m., in Downtown Manhattan's financial district for lunch.

The three then headed to a pub located on a narrow cobblestone street deep within the cavernous patch of land where buildings inspired by finance touch the sky.

Inside, dim light, drab wood tables and a line of customers at a steam table that included Turkey and cranberry sauce, Cajun Strip Steak, vegetables and crusted macaroni and Cheese.

Sitting at the tables were business attired patrons on lunch breaks.

Being that it was a few days before Halloween, fake spider webs coated the ceiling.

And, since it was only eight days before a national election, much of the soft but steady conversation filling the room was punctuated by Obama, Palin and McCain and Biden.

After the three settled into one of the the worn wooden booths, they too joined the conversation between bites of the hearty food and syrupy flat soda.

Despite polls predicting otherwise, one of the three raised doubts about a Democratic win, a hope they all said they subscribed to.

The doubter worried that while the potential election of the African American candidate created the appearance that race no longer plays an active role in American politics, the fear remained, racism could rear its ugly head on election day.

At that point, one of the three teased the doubter about his Southern upbringing, while the other, a New York native laughed but with caution, chimed in, saying what goes on behind the curtain of a voting booth, often stays behind the curtain.

The doubter kept saying that this is America, a place where hypocrisy and secrets often reveal themselves in subtle fashions. He charged that America was still a place where inequity could be measured along racial and class lines and that it was on full display in policy and even in the most mundane activities of day to day life.

This was after all, a nation that would legitimize campaign questions based on rumors about one man's religion while failing to live by a "golden rule" that clearly calls for all people to be treated, as they themselves would want to be treated, with decency, compassion and respect.

Evidence of his charges could be found in countless news stories, statistics and facts. This was a nation where prejudice and discrimination were still tolerated, offering as an example, California, where the threat of Proposition 8 offered reaffirmation that we as a nation allowed the majority to pick and choose who was worthy of equality.

After more polite discussion, lunch was finished, and the three rejoined the day outside where despite the crisp weather, the mood on the sidewalks appeared as flat as the earlier soda, a place where worry infected the collective mindset as fears of financial upheaval, two major wars and a sense of lost direction dimmed the lights at the end of the tunnel.

The downtown streets surrounding the epicenter of business were filled with camera ready tourists and cigarette puffing traders who quietly strolled, all mingling together amidst security barriers, television crews and checkpoints manned by men with guns.

The three friends then made there way back to the original gathering point, and dropped off the one who worked in the area. The other two, hopped on bikes and headed out of the cavernous old New Amsterdam, and over to the open air of the Harbor where the statue of Liberty beckoned. Then, after texting friends and some small talk about the past weekend, the two headed uptown along the river.

Along the way, the two noticed a group of around four casually dressed people who were staring down at the ground. One of them was taking a picture of what appeared to be either a large grey bug. After a good bit of pointing, giggling and conversing in what sounded like Italian, the group, obviously tourists, lumbered along leaving the small creature on the concrete surface.

The two, still on their bikes decided to have a look.

As they made there way over to the little spot, one of the two exclaimed "it's a tarantula!"

"No, it's a sea crab," said the other.

It was in fact a small crab, obviously from the harbor. The crab was moving sideways at the pace of caterpillar, apparently trying to make its way around the concrete barrier into the nearby weeds.

The two stood there and watched the little grey creature, which suddenly began to scurry into the safety of bushes and tall grass.

The crab was then gone, at least, the two on the bikes could no longer see it. They had no desire to dig and find it either, so, they continued to bike north.

As they rode along, they spotted yet another small group of people. Among them this time, a little girl petting what appeared to be a tiny spotted leopard.

"It's a virtual zoo out here!" remarked one of the two friends to the other.

"What is that?" he asked?

In this new group of three, a middle aged looking woman with perfectly white hair, had a large spotted cat on a leash. The cat was eying a squirrel that seemed to be teasing the cat. The squirrel bobbed its head and nibbled on food it took from the ground. The cat, sat with its neck stretched, at full attention, transfixed on the squirrel. The little girl, continued to pet the cat with caution, keeping her distance, while the cat did not seem to notice she was even there. A short distance away, another woman manned an empty stroller.

After a few minutes of staring at this scene, the two on bikes continued uptown.

Finally, they stopped at the World Financial Center, a modern complex of buildings on the shore of the river that adjoins the World Trade Center Site, also known as Ground Zero.

In the small marina at the base of the complex, are several yachts, sail boats and other marine vessels.

The two on bikes bought some peaches and cream gelato at an ice cream store in the complex, then sat outside on a concrete bench and enjoyed the sun.

Here too, despite the sunny day, the mood appeared quiet, subtle, as if New York City was calm before a storm.

The afternoon marched on, the two spent more time taking, pondering their hopes for the future, discussing their belief that government can and should do great things for its people. But still, one of them worried, that on election day polls mean nothing, that in America, even among liberals, racism is like cancer, it whispers as it destroys.

On this Monday in 2008, beneath the ghost of a shadow cast by twin towers that are now gone, the two pondered their hopes for the future, a future they hopped would begin next Tuesday.

After a while, one of the two continued uptown and left the other alone. The doubter sat and thought for a moment. Soon, his worries began to evolve back into bright light of hope.

When hope is real, it usually trumps the fear of the past.

Moveon is Not Greenwashing Gavin Newsom's Corporate Party

2009-03-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

By Bob Brigham

When San Francisco blogger Sasha McGee noticed that Gavin Newsom was being feted by PG&E and AT&T at the Denver convention, it wasn't much of a surprise to see a DLC candidate running for governor of the largest state. What was a surprise, was that Moveon was also listed as a sponsor.

But fear not, Moveon hasn't sold out, their logo showing up was a mistake.

In addition to the somewhat unseemly relationship between Newsom and PG&E, it seemed strange that MoveOn would cosponsor an event with one of the big drivers behind the move to preemptively absolve the nation's biggest telecommunications companies of any consequences from their spying on Americans. MoveOn was a strong champion of the idea that these companies broke the law, and should suffer the consequences. That much of AT&T's involvement took place in San Francisco only added particular irony to the situation.

Indeed. And there is a huge gulf between the people-powered progressive side of the Democratic Party and the corporate-powered, DLC side represented by Gavin Newsom. For instance, compare how Moveon and Gavin Newsom responded to Al Gore's push to go to 100% clean energy. Moveon issued a challenge to sign on that they would deliver, "to elected leaders and candidates across the country." Gavin Newsom apparently didn't get the memo as he opposes San Francisco turning on 100% clean energy:

When I approached Newsom at Netroots Nation after he gave a well-received speech on climate change, I asked him if he supported the Clean Energy Act. His initial response was "yes," but he added that he didn't think it was all that substantive. Eric Jaye was standing next to us at the time - and as I started to walk away, Jaye said something to Newsom. The Mayor then called out to me and asked, "did you mean the one about PG&E?" I said "yes," and he then said: "oh, it's horrible. I don't support it." Newsom wouldn't explain why, and denied that Jaye working for PG&E had anything to do with his position.

And moveon plays well with other, while just last week Gavin Newsom's taxpayer funded press secretary used the term, "lunatic fringe" to refer to the Democratic Party. Moveon works in solidarity with progressive blogs, while Gavin Newsom crossed the local netroots picket line and hired former Lieberman-consultant Garry South, whose idea of listening to online feedback can best be summed up in his own words (directed at calitics publisher Brian Leubitz:

Here's my final word: When you have actually run and won a campaign electing a Democrat to any office at any level, instead of just sitting at your computer composing bile and bilge and hitting "send," come back and talk to me. Until then, you can kiss my . . . baby.

If Gavin Newsom wants to publicize AT&T and PG&E buying his ass, that is his decision. But he can't hide behind moveon. And to have two of the worst corporations pay for him to have a party during the speech of the VP nominee is selfishly uncool. As for moveon, always cool. Please spread the word so people don't get the impression moveon has any association with the awful corporations trying to elect Newsom governor.

Iraq in Fragments

2009-03-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

Everyone needs to see this movie: Iraq in Fragments by James Longley.

http://www.iraqinfragments..com/

We caught this movie on the weekend at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) annual doc film fest, Stranger Than Fiction.

The occupation of Iraq has been a disastrous failure and the country has descended into bloody civil war fueled by ancient and irreconcilable sectarian and ethnic tensions....or at least that's what I'm reading in the The Irish Times these days. Why does the Western media repeat this mantra with such dedication? Iraq in Fragments addresses the issue of ethnic divisions in Iraq. This movie is "an opus in three parts," in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds tell the story of life in their area. Under American occupation ethnic tensions in Iraq have been carefully nurtured, the result of "divide and conquer" policies enacted by Viceroy L. Paul Bremer III and the now defunct American Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This movie is a powerful documentation of the hopes and frustrations of an occupied nation, and their struggle for freedom.

The corporate press have been very consistent in their message. "We are losing the war; the war is bad." That I can read everyday for the price of a newspaper. The implicit message is that if we were winning the war, the war would be good. This was essentially the message in 2003 and that message continued, even throughout the period when American justifications for aggression where exposed as "a pack of vicious lies" (George Galloway). "We are winning the war; the war is good." That story did not last long. It became overwhelmingly obvious, not long after John Kerry lost the 2004 election by refusing to speak against the occupation, that opposition to the war in the United States was in danger of getting out of hand. People were starting to get really pissed off and some of them might even come to the wrong conclusions. That is when American planners changed strategies. The corporate media was not far behind. It was clear to everyone that the occupation had not brought Freedom & Democracy to Iraq. Worst of all, it had not brought prosperity to the United States, which had always been the most crucial justification. If the occupation had not brought democracy to Iraq, then we must be losing the war! There is no other conceivable explanation. "We are losing the war; the war is bad." There is no concept of war being bad on its own terms. There is no space for public discourse that opposes American imperialism, regardless of whether it is winning or losing. This is the logic of a rigid and strictly controlled ideological system. By definition, America always seeks democracy; its enemies always seek to destroy it. When Saddam Hussein was an official ally, his regime was by definition democratic. When the evil bastard turned against us, he became undemocratic. When he used the weapons we gave him to kill Kurdish people he was democratic. But later, when he became undemocratic, his previous actions became war crimes, the very thing American foreign policy had been seeking to abolish all along. The new puppet regime we have installed post-Saddam is of course democratic. The real goals of American aggression remain hidden in the fog of war.

In the world of public relations, we are losing the war, not because of our own actions, but because of our inability to unite the country under one central government and one national Iraqi constitution (written by us, enshrining American corporate access to vital resources). This is our cross to bear. This is our burden. If only they would listen to reason, but instead, the Shiites and Sunni are too busy going to mosque and counting bullets. This is our failure, despite our best intentions. The risk of civil war in Iraq has been exaggerated to justify the continuing military occupation, thereby giving our messianic leaders time to draw up some sort of coherent plan, an "exit strategy" if you will, that can ensure American interests in the long run, thereby "stabilizing" the region. We have dug a large hole and we are losing the war. The only logical thing to do is keep digging. In the lexicon of the US State Department a country is only "stable" if it is under direct American control. Therefore the Bolivarian Revolucion in Venezuela, which has increased standards of living drastically by strategic nationalization, has "destabilized" the region by diminishing American control over the domestic economy. Destabilization is of course a very bad thing. President Bush has bravely warned undemocratic forces in South America that further "destabilization of the region" will not be tolerated.

The corporate media quickly turned on the war. Certain American planners turned on their own war in order to control criticism of it. This is in essence the role of the Democratic Party. But the media in general were quick to turn on a war that they felt they could no longer justify to the public, at least not as belligerently as before. The Democratic Party controls dissent in the United States by creating the illusion of opposition. The corporate media control dissent by framing the scope of criticism, to ensure that anti-war sentiment stays within acceptable frameworks. Larger conclusions about the nature of war and capitalism and colonialism are never drawn. The war is bad because we are losing it; our altruistic goals have been thwarted by al-Qaeda and France. The war is bad, we agree, not because 650,000 Iraqis are dead, not because over 4 million people have been forced to flee their homes, not because the occupation violates international law, not because the neoliberal policies we imposed have devastated their economy, not because we have destroyed a nation, and certainly not because we are unwelcome. The war is bad because of our inability to convince the locals to embrace the democracy we have granted them. The Pax Americana, conceptualized by Dick Cheney and The Project for a New American Century, will "Americanize" the Middle East and grant the troubled Arabs peace & stability.

The truth is that sectarian sentiment in Iraq is easily eclipsed by near-universal opposition to the American occupation of their homeland. This is the unacceptable truth Iraq in Fragments crystallizes in every frame, making it overwhelmingly unpopular at Young Republican meetings across the country. Despite the disparity of the stories, the film flows with a wholeness that is both grand and intimate in scale. "What this movie shows, you will never see on the evening news" (Michael Moore).

Globally, the term democracy is vaguely understood to mean some kind of self-determination. The American occupation of Iraq may be many things, but it is almost certainly not self-determination. The global population, especially the "global south," tend to define democracy as freedom from corporate globalization. This translates very clearly to freedom from American hegemony and the Monroe Doctrine more specifically. In the early 1960s a great wave of global altruism swept across the United States and so we occupied Vietnam as the shining example of our dedication to global peace & justice. When the Vietnamese resisted the occupation of their homeland, they were resisting democracy. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese chose to organize themselves into armed militias. They fought day and night, from village to village, with very few weapons, against the very people who had only come to give them democracy. To protect them from communism. To protect them from themselves. We bombed them to protect them. It was for their own good. The ungrateful South Vietnamese. The Viet Cong. The people we were there to protect. The people that we fought against. The people that with few resources defeated the most powerful military machine in human history...they overwhelmingly supported American involvement in South East Asia, according to all creditable American news agencies at the time.

Unfortunately some violent and cynical malcontents in Iraq have chosen to take up arms against our selfless occupation of their homeland. If only their ancient and petty sectarianism would end so that they could stop and enjoy the Mesopotamian paradise we have created for them! It is sad that they fight each other, but what more can we do? We have already rebuilt their country from top to bottom. In city after city across the nation. We have given them state of the art architecture and technology. Hospitals and schools and apartment buildings. We paved every road. We fed every child. We have eliminated all forms of poverty and hopelessness with dynamic and expansive social programs, investing heavily in local community projects, rejuvenating public space and municipal democracy. We promoted a pluralistic and cosmopolitan society by retaining and enhancing a vast civil service. The Iraqi people did not go a day without a single utility. Every man, woman and strong lad are employed by the strong and dynamic economy we nurtured in every sector, diversified with sustainable development. We have restored their infrastructure and their sense of self worth. We have given them democracy, we have safe guarded their national treasures and we have respected their history and culture.

But sadly they still fight among each other like savage children, despite the best efforts of their American benefactors. "We are losing the war; the war is bad," but what more could we have done?

Hard Times Mean Dangerous Roads as Americans Drop Car Insurance

2009-03-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

Hard Times Mean Dangerous Roads as Americans Drop Car Insurance

A recent report in the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail says more and more American drivers are opting to let their car insurance lapse in order to save money in this period of economic downturn.

According to Sam Belden, vice president of Insurance.com, an online insurance agency representing several different insurance companies, says that the number of uninsured motorists has doubled in the past year, nationwide.

West Virginia is no exception to this trend, falling roughly in the middle of the pack with regard to the percentage of uninsured motorists. Steve Dale, deputy commissioner of West Virginia’s Division of Motor Vehicles, says, “There are states which have higher uninsured rates and states with lower, but DMV would like to do more. It doesn’t really matter what the percentage is if you are the one that meets the driver that is uninsured.”

also says that that the number of drivers in his state whose licenses are suspended for lack of insurance has remained fairly consistently between 7,000 and 9,000 a year, and that each of them poses a risk to other drivers on the road.

But while the numbers in West Virginia are fairly constant, across the country it’s a much different story. Sam Belden says that 20% of drivers are not covered this year – as opposed to only 10% last year, and money is the primary reason why.

“Money is a little tight with people, and they decide if they need to skip on something, they’ll let their insurance lapse,” Belden told reporters. He went on to explain that this trend is directly related to the economy, and that, “…it’s exacerbated by premiums also rising over the past year. When people are squeezed the most, the insurance rates are also going up.”

On average, insurance premiums increased by 6 to 7% during 2008, and there are more increases coming in 2009.

More data is expected later this month, when the Insurance Research Council, an organization funded by the insurance industry, is due to release a study supporting the fact that several hundred thousand drivers dropped their insurance in 2008 at least in part because of the jobless rate. In addition, the study is expected to show that roughly 40% of callers who followed up on online applications in 2008 let their policies lapse – up from 10% a few years ago.

David Corum, vice president of the council, explained that the study will also reveal that a single percentage point increase in unemployment causes a half-point increase in uninsured drivers.

The last such study by the Insurance Research Council was released based on data from June, 2006, and showed that the highest rates of uninsured motorists were found in Mississippi, Alabama, and California, while West Virginia came in at around 10%, against a national average of roughly 15%.

West Virginia is one of twenty states that requires drivers to include insurance for un- and underinsured motorists as part of their policies, which increases premiums by seven to nine percent. In order to recover costs, over and above insurance, the only option is to sue an uninsured motorist.

Belden cautions that even in hard times, maintaining your car insurance is crucial, as drivers who allow policies to lapse are generally hit for a 50% surcharge for new policies. He also suggests that drivers talk to their insurance companies about switching to monthly payments, stating, “If you pay once every three months, the amount may look absurd. You can move to monthly payments to even it out.”

He also advises that some insurance companies will take partial payments from time to time, and that the worst thing you can do is not ask about your options.

Is America's criminal Justice System Antagonistic?

2009-03-03T13:36:00.000-08:00

by CODY LYON

(Cross posted by author from Oh My News International)

But in the end, it appears that in the rush to convict law enforcement officials used inappropriate interrogation techniques that led to what are called coerced confessions, apparently obtained from each of the accused in the Central Park Jogger case.

It would take years before the shameful second tragedy of the Central Park case would play out, under less media scrutiny than the highly publicized horror of that night in spring.

by CODY LYON

On April 19, 1989, joggers, cyclists and other New Yorkers sought refuge from the stress of urban life in the city's backyard, Central Park. But, as the night sky grew dark, a series of menacing incidents rattled the calm of an otherwise beautiful spring evening.

Reports of random violence began to trickle in to the Central Park precinct of the New York City Police Department.

But, it was a chilling report from the wee hours of the morning that would shatter the tranquility of Central Park and divide an entire city.

At around 1:30 a.m. a late night runner discovered a severely beaten woman lying in a puddle of mud on a wooded footpath in the northern tier of the park. The young woman, an employee of a downtown bank and an accomplished musician, was close to death. Police say she had been repeatedly raped; her skull was crushed with what appeared to be a rock or brick.

The victim was 29-year-old Patricia Meili. At the time, her identity hidden, she became known to New York City residents as simply the Central Park Jogger. When details of her attack became public, tensions were soon boiling as much of the city found itself enraged over the senseless and vicious nature of the violent attack. To many, the senseless crime symbolized what they saw as an out of control city.

According to blaring tabloid headlines, five Black and Latino teenage boys had been accused of gang raping Meili and then beating her head and body to a bloody pulp with a rock. Allegedly, the teenagers had engaged in marauding behavior called "wilding" during the hours before the attack her. Police revealed videotaped confessions that captured the young men offering details of the crime during an interrogation session at a police station in the park.

The press ran with the story, showing pictures of the young men under headlines like "wilding pack of teens" in Central Park. The resulting collective race, class and fear based tensions brought chills to the city in spring.

But in the end, it appears that in the rush to convict law enforcement officials used inappropriate interrogation techniques that led to what are called coerced confessions, apparently obtained from each of the accused in the Central Park Jogger case.

It would take years before the shameful second tragedy of the Central Park case would play out, under less media scrutiny than the highly publicized horror of that night in spring.

The Central Park Jogger case is just one example of what some say has proven over the years to be a significant national problem. There are estimates saying that improperly obtained confessions could number in the hundreds or even thousands, splashing an ugly stain on a fundamental principal of the American justice system.

According to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, "coerced confessions wholly undermine the criminal justice system and violate the constitutional rights of defendants."

There are a number of widely known missteps by law enforcement where an alleged perpetrator's rights may have been violated, resulting in what could be seen as a technically coerced confession.

The most common misstep is a violation of the Miranda law, when police officers do not inform the accused of his or her right to attorney, or the right to silence.

The 1966 Miranda law advises suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights. Miranda is meant to protect a suspect from self-incrimination upon being arrested, and to make sure that any statements made during interrogation are indeed voluntary.

But what goes on behind closed doors in interrogation rooms is more complex, being private and less open to scrutiny by observers.

Interrogation rooms are meant to be intimidating places where suspects are coaxed to talk. But, according to some, on rare occasions, in order to get a suspect to say what the interrogator needs to indict, misleading tricks, lies or other techniques often enter the picture. In the end, when this occurs, problems for prosecutors can emerge later in court if effectively challenged by the defense.

Ultimately, unless interrogation sessions are recorded, there is no tangible record to verify what takes place or is said during interrogations. And, because there is no uniform set of federal or state guidelines as to when cameras or tape recorders roll, there is no way to know what was said, or perhaps even rehearsed, before a suspect's confession is made.

In a 2002 letter to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the New York Civil Liberties Union urged the NYPD to begin taping all interrogations from start to finish.

The letter alleged that in several high profile cases, primarily reacting to the Central Park Jogger case, law enforcement had obtained inappropriate, perhaps questionable, confessions in criminal cases.

Often, cases where confessions were proven false have involved situations where a suspect is tricked into believing that there is existing evidence of guilt, or perhaps assurance that a confession will result in a lighter sentence.

But with the advent and acceptance of DNA science as a source of evidence in court, a new factor has come into play and a number of convictions, some allegedly obtained through questionable coerced confessions, have been overturned in the end.

In fact, nationwide, around 180 inmates have been released over the past few years, thanks to the introduction of DNA evidence. DNA trails are capable of directly connecting or erasing physical connections between a suspect and a crime scene or victim.

Still, there is room for caution in calling for a wholesale re-examination of the nation's criminal convictions.

Speaking from his home in Graham, N.C., Alamance County District Attorney Robert Johnson, a 31-year veteran of the criminal justice system, cautioned that the number of coerced confessions are fairly small when compared with the overall number of successful criminal convictions obtained in part through law enforcement interrogations.

But he still admits that one wrongful conviction obtained through a coerced conviction, is one too many.

Johnson stressed that in seeking a conviction, a confession should be just one element, sort of the icing on the cake of evidence needed to find the truth. Johnson noted that in most criminal cases physical evidence is essential in court.

Most legal experts agree that without physical evidence any conviction is open for doubt.

"Evidence is essential," said Pamela Bucy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Bucy also says that coercion is usually not necessary during interrogations because guilty suspects usually start to talk anyway. She says that when confronted with the evidence, suspects often admit guilt.

In North Carolina, Johnson has seen firsthand the importance of using DNA evidence to obtain a confession from a suspect.

Ultimately, that evidence was used to obtain a confession from one suspect, and then fully exonerate a wrongfully convicted man who had served a number of years in jail for a crime that it turned out he did not commit.

In 1984, Ronald Cotton had been convicted of the rape of Jennifer Thompson, after she had mistakenly identified him as her attacker. Cotton served the next 10 years in a North Carolina Prison.

Despite Cotton's conviction, police had long suspected another man, Bobby Poole who by then was serving time for a similar crime.

In 1995, police obtained DNA samples from Poole that provided necessary evidence linking Poole, not Cotton, to the crime.

Once verified, Johnson sent his detectives to interview Poole in prison.

"During the first hour of interrogation, one of my detectives came out and said that he'd made an incriminating statement," recalled Johnson.

But Johnson said he wanted to be sure. He told the officer questioning Poole that he needed specific details of the crime scene directly from Poole.

"I told him that's not good enough, go back in there and get clothing and location, all details," said Johnson.

The point being "we didn't just want someone confessing to this crime, we wanted necessary evidence, the detailed information that only Poole would have known about," noted Johnson in his quest for a solid case and exoneration.

Eventually the DNA evidence, as well as Poole's detailed admission proved that Cotton was not the man who had raped Thompson, thus paving the way for Cotton's exoneration. Johnson says that although they felt sure of Cotton's innocence once they had the DNA evidence, they also needed the confession from Poole to fully secure Cotton's freedom.

But such a full and forthcoming admission of guilt from Poole, a confession that would be fully admissible and believable in a court of law, took patience and perseverance and not coercion based on purely suspect behaviors.

Johnson says interrogators must be careful in their attempts to get the details like those he needed to convict the correct suspect in the North Carolina case. He says that oftentimes, right after a particularly high-profile heinous crime, there is a rush or sense of urgency in the need to convict and that may lead interrogators to engage in the inappropriate tactics involved in what might be called a forced coercion.

He also cautioned that those doing the questioning must not employ tactics that might be seen as inhumane.

"When interrogating someone, an officer has to be mindful, and not deny food, drink, water support and respite," said Johnson.

Defense attorneys often use charges of coercion as a tactic in court.

Johnson said that often a defense attorney will ask for a suppression of a statement. In other words, a suspect wants to recount or deny what was said during a confession.

Still, proving that a statement was coerced involves meeting the satisfaction of the court, meeting a burden of proof that is challenging at best.

Johnson says that most false confessions usually involve matters of illness, mental incapacity, injury and fear beyond the trauma of being in an interrogation room.

A complaint filed by the original Central Park Jogger suspects charged that maximization techniques were the tools used by interrogators that night back in the spring of 1989.

The Central Park Jogger crime occurred in a time before the seeds of DNA evidence had taken root as tools of evidence in the United States judicial system. And some say New York Law Enforcement authorities needed a suspect to appease the public's outrage over the brutality of the incident that night in the park.

In the case of the Central Park Jogger, the original group of suspects easily fit the psyche of local tabloids and what was clearly a traumatized and apparently divided city.

But as history has shown, in the thirst to obtain a shut and close case, justice was in fact denied on three fronts.

In May 2002, another man, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and convicted murderer, confessed to the horrific 1989 attack on Meili.

Later, DNA evidence positively linked Reyes to the crime.

That same year, after serving 5 to 13 years each, the five men, now ranging in age from 28 to 30, saw a judge dismiss the charges that had vilified them before an entire city. The five had spent a large portion of their lives in prison based on what some now say was a coerced confession and no forensic evidence.

According to a $50 million complaint against the New York City Police Department and the New York district attorney's office, the confessions that had sent the five teenagers to jail was improperly coerced.

The complaint says that the recorded statement used to convict the young men and stoke the flames of media hysteria was in fact rehearsed.

The complaint says that the police exploited the young age of the suspects and the lack of experience they and their parents had with the criminal justice system. The interrogation methods allegedly included coercion, isolation, intimidation, manipulation, suggestiveness, deceit, false promises, sleep deprivation, actively shaping the content of the statements before they were formerly given, telling the plaintiffs to put their statements in writing and withholding certain information from suspects and family members about the true intent behind the questioning.

The New York district attorney's office and the lawyers bringing the case could not comment on the closed case.

Questions were raised about the New York City police culture and about how widespread similar techniques were in other cases. As North Carolina's Johnson cautions, an effective and fair interrogator must be properly trained and very disciplined.

Ultimately, Johnson says that our adversarial judicial system has become antagonistic. He said that has led to an adrenalin driven pattern of behavior throughout the nation's legal system.

But, Johnson also blames public expectations of law enforcement that have risen beyond reality. He says that there is a great deal of pressure from the public to solve crimes quickly, as if real life mirrors the rapidity in crime solving that takes place in one hour television programs like CSI.

Johnson said that unfortunately the expectations often put much greater pressure on police to obtain confessions in crimes and that can contribute to a way of thinking that has the potential to lead to police misconduct.

Many agree, that ultimately, the quest for instant gratification can lead to instances of flawed legal administration in a court system that is meant to dispense justice and not a conviction at any cost.

Remembering the 2005 NYC "Superbug"

2009-03-03T13:33:00.000-08:00

By villager

by CODY LYON
On February 5, 2005, the New York City Department of Health in conjunction with the Aaron Diamond Aids Research Center called a press conference and issued an urgent health alert to the public. The event was especially targeted towards men who have sex with men. According to health officials, one individual had been infected with what appeared to be a never before seen particularly potent and apparently mutated strain of HIV that had rapidly progressed to full blown AIDS.

Doctors treating the patient said the man was resistant to three out of four classes of drugs available used to treat HIV/AIDS, a condition clinically called 3-DCR-HIV.

At the press conference, New York City Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden, warned "virtually no one is immune" saying the new super strain virus could quickly progress into full-blown AIDS, perhaps in as little as two to twenty months, a process that normally takes up to ten years.

By CODY LYON
(posted by author)
On February 5, 2005, the New York City Department of Health in conjunction with the Aaron Diamond Aids Research Center called a press conference and issued an urgent health alert to the public. The event was especially targeted towards men who have sex with men. According to health officials, one individual had been infected with what appeared to be a never before seen particularly potent and apparently mutated strain of HIV that had rapidly progressed to full blown AIDS.

Doctors treating the patient said the man was resistant to three out of four classes of drugs available used to treat HIV/AIDS, a condition clinically called 3-DCR-HIV.

At the press conference, New York City Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden, warned "virtually no one is immune" saying the new super strain virus could quickly progress into full-blown AIDS, perhaps in as little as two to twenty months, a process that normally takes up to ten years.

Health officials described the patient as a man in his mid-forties, who had binged on the drug crystal methamphetamine and had un-protected sex with numerous partners, a number the Department said was 'possibly hundreds.'

The DOHMH said the encounters had occurred at sex parties or individually, arranged through "hook-up" sites on the Internet.

A firestorm of controversy, debate and media sensationalism followed the press conference.

Fault lines erupted both inside and outside the gay community as fingers were pointed at recreational drugs and "reckless" lifestyles. Fear laced with words of caution competed with skepticism over the accuracy of the reported science from Aaron Diamond Institute and the Health Department.

But many condemned the New York City Health Department for issuing a health alert that some called hasty and shrill.

Central to the skepticism were questions and worries about how gay men would react if the science proved false or inconclusive. Further, were worries that the public's perception of gay men would be tainted by reports of reckless behaviors in the age of AIDS. And, if the diagnosis of a new "super-bug" proved false, would the understanding and attitudes surrounding what HIV/AIDS is, a disease littered with a history of misinformation, rumors, prejudice and conspiracy theories become even more misunderstood and misinformed?

Overall immediate public reaction to the press conference and subsequent news reports was grim and flavored with what some saw as patronizing condemnation of the affected community, gay men.

Newspaper headlines were announcing that a new "super virus" had made an appearance in New York. The New York "Daily News" screamed "Super Bug Scary: World's First Case of Drug Resistant Strain Found Here," while another Daily News headline read "Super HIV Man Had Sex Binge with 100." Meanwhile, the "New York Post" warned of a "Super Bug Nightmare Strain" and the "The "New York Times"" said Gays had "Grown Complacent" about HIV, which contributed to reckless behavior.

Within the Gay Community some began to directly link crystal meth use to the "new strain" issuing wholesale condemnations of the highly addictive drug. In the mainstream press, a number of columnists and editorial writers began to scold the reportedly promiscuous behavior and its alleged impacts.

For example, Former ""Newsday"" reporter Laurie Garret wrote "Those who use methamphetamine and prowl for sex need the wake-up call" and "Washington Post" columnist Richard Cohen wrote that when gays "are victims of discrimination they need to be defended, but when they are victims of their own behavior, they need to be condemned."

But, in the background of the ensuing coverage, doctors and experts began raising skeptical concerns about the timing and tone of the alert.

"In its haste to issue a health alert, the Department of Health and Aaron Diamond failed to consider the impact of such frantic media coverage" said Dr. Michael Saag, Director of the Center for AIDS Research at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

"The average reader will focus on the behavior of gay men" said Dr. Saag.

He noted that news of the New York Department of Health press conference was the lead story in the next day's "Birmingham News".

"It is not a helpful message in an era when we are trying to communicate that HIV is a sexually transmitted disease that effects anyone who is sexually active, not just gay men" said Dr. Saag from Birmingham, Ala.

Amid the shrill headlines, controversy and fear, questions were raised about a more probable theory regarding the patient's condition, a theory that appeared to contradict the Health Department's conclusion in the health alert.

"The intersection of the patient's drug resistance and rapid progression made this man's condition unique" said Jessica Frickey, a spokesperson at The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

HIV is a highly variable disease. It is usually the 'host virus interaction' that determines the characteristics of a case, not the virus itself. In fact, there are individuals who may be more genetically susceptible to a quicker progression to full-blown AIDS. That condition has been called rapid progression.

Was this patient's condition an unfortunate intersection of two deadly factors, rapid progression and anti-viral drug resistence?

Apparently, that would have indicated that the individual who played host to the virus was genetically pre-disposed to a rapid-fire progression to full blown AIDS.

Futher, could the man's drug resistance have been a result of being infected by an individual who was infected with a mutated version of the HIV virus, a disturbing but potential cause of his anti-viral reisistence? Doctors say that HIV drug resistance can develop in a patient after taking drugs over an extended period.

Like other viruses or bacteria, HIV strains begin to mutate and show resistance over time, in essence, outsmarting some drugs or drug combinations, similar to anti-biotic resistance. When this happens, doctors usually manipulate, switch or re-evaluate the patient's cocktail of medicine until an effective anti-viral regimen is found.

But the reporting in the "super-virus" case implied that the patient had been infected a new "strain" as if the bug itself had mutated into a newly emerged form of the virus meaning that AIDS, already deadly, had grown into an even more dire threat.

Some supporters of the initial health alert press conference to say that the use of the term new "strain" was incorrect.

"There would need to be evidence of significant biological difference to warrant the designation of a new strain" admitted Dr. Jay Dobkin, Director of the AIDS Center at Columbia University.

Some advocates of full and forthcoming medical information, as well as a few medical experts began to openly and loudly question whether the health alert had indeed been based on inconclusive science. There were rumblings that that the alert was being used as an overly cautious and condescending tactic to try and change what some argue were increasing risky behaviors within the Gay male community?

Martin Delaney, co-founder of the San Francisco based organization "Project Inform" argued that the health alert was meant to scare people into changing behavior.

Delaney also questioned whether the science behind the alert was solid.

"None of the science was sound" and "no matter what Aaron Diamond and The Department of Health think they knew at the time of the press conference, they could not possibly have had any useful information about how widely this "new strain" had spread, or what its clinical consequences would be."

Some doctors concurred with Delaney's assertion noting that in fact, the reportedly "new" strain was actually nothing new.

"This particular strain has been seen before thus is not new" said University of Alabama Birmingham's Dr. Michael Saag of the new "super-strain".

Dr. Harold Jaffe is the former director of the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since leaving CDC, Dr. Jaffe has been a fellow and Professor of Public Health at Oxford University in London.

Jaffe said the Health Department's alert was probably a well intentioned but overly cautious approach that used fear to try and curb what most experts charge are risky behaviors.

At the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections Conference in Boston, two weeks after the Health Alert was issued, Dr. Jaffe argued that fear might motivate behavior changes in the short term, but it ultimately leads people to not trust messages of prevention.

Later, during a phone conversation from London, Jaffee further explained his reluctance to support the decision to issue a health alert.

Still, he cautioned that far to many gay men have become more careless, in part because of the false sense of security provided by new HIV drugs.

"A number of factors are probably contributing to increasingly risky behavior among men who have sex with men (or msm), and "lack of fear is probably a factor, but I personally don't believe the New York case should be used to scare gay men into safer behavior" said Dr. Jaffe.

Still, one of the world's groundbreaking pioneers in HIV/AIDS research defended his institution's decision to issue the alert.

"We felt it was appropriate to bring such an extreme case to the attention of public health authorities" said Dr. David Ho, Executive Director of The Aaron Diamond Institute.

"ADRAC stands by its decisions involving this case," said Dr. Ho.

Columbia University's Dr. Jay Dobkin suggested that the decision to issue the alert and the ensuing media coverage linking Crystal Meth use to increasing risk of HIV infection, may have in fact, been constructive by helping to discourage what many see as reckless behaviors.

Still, some question Dr. Dobkin and Ho's seemingly clinical rhetoric.

Martin Delaney argues that many health officials see the world through academic lenses that is out of touch with the reality "on the ground."

"People do not engage in unsafe behaviors because they have considered issues of treatment" noting that drug use and unsafe behavior are not "reasoned choices," said Delaney.

Reasoned or not, according to a one survey by The Center for HIV/AIDS Education Studies or CHEST at New York University, men who used Crystal, were three times more likely to contract HIV through receptive anal intercourse than those who did not use meth. Among gay men who admit to recreational drug use, 62 percent admit to at least having tried crystal.

Debate over how best to affect sexual practices or change behaviors range from harm reduction tactics to zero tolerance approaches. Harm reduction encourages those who do use recreational drugs, to do so responsibly, and be armed with knowledge on how best to protect oneself from increased risk of HIV infection.

Some worry that zero tolerance approaches about certain behaviors, or fear tactics, simply encourage denial and drive behaviors further underground often leading to destructive collective side effects such as increasing rates of HIV.

Over the past 5 years, HIV infection rates have risen among gay men under the age of 30 in New York City according to the City's Department of Health. At the same time, HIV infection rates have fallen by around 22 percent among older gay men.

While some say the complacency over un-safe sexual activity among many gay men may have been temporarily shaken by the super-bug reports, some express worries that collective distrust of medical officials and authorities was the end result.

"If it turns out the `super-bug" is really an isolated case, the gay community may feel they were being manipulated" said Dr. Harold Jaffe.

As of 2008, the 2005 "super-strain" or "bug" was an isolated case.

The New Yorker" Cartoon: The Jokes on the People

2009-03-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

By villager
by CODY LYON
In fact, the increasingly famous "New Yorker" cover held up a mirror to the campaign, the media and more importantly to America itself. The cartoon revealed some offensive truths about how this campaign has been conducted and covered, but also, about America in general and how out of touch with reality so many of us truly are.

by CODY LYON

It looks as if some Americans have finally found a cartoon they can get really upset about.

Last week's "New Yorker" cover cartoon featuring presumed Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama and wife Michelle, both in outrageous garb that included the Senator in a turbin, sandals and robe, with Michelle sporting an Angela `Davisesque' 70's afro, a gun, both fist-bumping all the while an American flag burned, has drawn condemnation and charges of "offensive and tasteless" from campaign spokespeople and supporters.

Tuesday evening, Senator Obama told CNN's Larry King that the cartoon "probably fueled misconceptions about me."

Really?

Was the cartoon offensive?

Of course it was.

Did it fuel misconceptions about the Senator and his wife?

Probably not......that's already been done.

In fact, the increasingly famous "New Yorker" cover held up a mirror to the campaign, the media and more importantly to America itself. The cartoon revealed some offensive truths about how this campaign has been conducted and covered, but also, about America in general and how out of touch with reality so many of us truly are.

First and foremost, this was the "New Yorker" being ironic, not some tabloid or sensationalistic media spook machine that was seeking to raise questions about the Senator of his wife's commitment to the nation's well being. The "New Yorker" is in fact, one the few bastions of intelligent and measured writing where analysis and good story telling pair up with meticulous investigative journalism. It is one of the few places that those with the patience, to actually read an article longer than four or five pages long,find articles that reveal facts, figures and truths about our Democracy, better yet, our world.

What might be considered offensive is the fact that so many Americans don't take the time to actually pick up the magazine and read those stories beyond that offensive cover.

But, even more offensive is the deeper truth pointed out by the cover and the seemingly insecure and condescending reaction that some Obama supporters and even some Republicans have claimed to have.

The "New Yorker" cover page makes fun of the sad fact that vast swaths of voters actually believe that the Obama's depicted in the cartoon are real. But, it also shines a light on the units of the media machine that have inadvertently helped perpetuate the rumors and innuendo that have led to misperceptions about the Obama's patriotism.

Now that's offensive.

The inability of Obama supporters to appreciate that sort of irony is offensive as well, since they know all to well, the cartoon, in its outrageousness and non-PC style, does exactly that.

But, by raising such a fuss about a cartoon in the "New Yorker", by going public with worries that it will affect voter's perception, those supporters, spokespersons, even the candidate are in essence participating in the wildfire of paranoia and condescension so common in American politics today?

If anything, "The New Yorker" that bastion of elitism was pointing out that America, despite being a place of instant information gratification is a place where vast portions of the public are ill informed, a public that shows increasing signs of collective ADD, always looking for the next shrill topic, the next scandal and not real truths that might inform them to make wise decisions in voting booths that might truly impact their communities, their nation their lives, truths often found in magazines like "The New Yorker".

It's really a shame that so many are up in arms about this cartoon. The only positive might be that more people may actually buy the magazine and read it.

This was clever satire and the jokes on `the people', not the Obamas.

Progressive Democrat Newsletter Issue 172

2009-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

The floods in the Midwest have continued and I include some information where I can in the Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin sections. Best of luck to all readers in the hard hit areas.

This week I return to an issue I discussed before: Republican cronies litterally killing our troops with no government oversight. This week Democratic Sentor Bob Casey is demanding an investigation of the electrocutions due to bad wiring that have been plaguing our military bases managed by a Hallibruton subsidiary. More below.

I have also been highlighting more about local blogs, Congressional races and Obama events in the various states I cover. Things are looking quite good. Recent polls have shown Obama with leads in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and is neck and neck with McCain in Florida, Georgia (thanks to Bob Barr's candidacy...just like I've been predicting), Alaska (again, I have been saying Obama can make this competitive), North Carolina and Virginia. An early lead Obama seemed to have in Indiana has been fading, something that doesn't surprise me at all. It is still a long time before November, so much can change. But they have been throwing all they can at Obama and so far he has been doing better and better. Most of the electoraal vote measures I follow have Obama solidly ahead. In fact they show him over or near 300 electoral votes, just like Senator Chuck Schumer predicts. Personally I believe Indiana and Florida (by hook or by crook) will go McCain. But I do believe that Obama will win, quite possibly with more than 300 electoral votes and will win some states that Democrats haven't won for decades.

This week I also bring together two related issues: the separation of church and state and I address Bush vs. McCain from a Jewish perspective. There are so many lies put out by McCain and other Republicans that we have to keep reminding everyone of the truth.

Obama and the Major Paradigm Budget Shift from Reagan

2009-03-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

By Bill Hare
In the February 26 New York Times David Leonhardt referred to Obama's new budget proposal as a "Bold Plan" to sweep away three decades of ideas attributable to Ronald Reagan.

To political strategists such as David Axelrod as well as economic gurus like Paul Krugman, this effort marks a necessary paradigm shift connected to a symbol in Reagan.

This represented in itself a bold new transition away from old ideas labeled "tax and spend" into a new era of individual initiative and responsibility led by a "citizen politician" in Reagan.

From the time that Reagan, following long rehearsal and preparation, announced his candidacy for governor of California in 1966, Golden State public relations expert Stuart Spencer along with partner Bill Roberts recognized that the key to marketing the former actor and host of television programs such as Death Valley Days and General Electric Theater was timing combined with astute use of corporate contributions.

These efforts implemented into the minds of Golden State voters a salable and clear cut image designed to achieve success.

The timing was perfect in 1966. Not only was it a mid-term election following a landslide of glacial proportions by President Lyndon Johnson, enhancing the prospect of enhancing Republican victories at the national and state levels.

There was also widespread dissatisfaction over the continuing Vietnam War that worked against Johnson and Democrats.

In 1966 the opportunity arose for a candidate accustomed to following scripts and speaking in clear, well modulated tones to voice the flavor of discontent that resounded to the rafters in the Peter Finch legendary performance in "Network" a decade later and the message, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

Reagan painted himself as an embodiment of citizen politics working outside a tainted system of professional politicians glutted with self-aggrandizement.

The former actor fit himself into the designated syndrome of a hero from the Frank Capra pre-World War Two movies embodied by James Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and Gary Cooper in "Meet John Doe."

The key on the part of the wily Spencer was to moderate Reagan's image as well, abandoning that of former hard right cause spokesperson, the Reagan who opposed Social Security and spoke at causes on behalf of the John Birch Society and Dr. Fred Schwarz' Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.

The upshot of the skilled, well financed public relations campaign and faux paradigm shift to government led by the common man as citizen politician was a smooth talking messenger programmed by a group referred to by longtime Reagan watcher and ultimate biographer Lou Cannon as the "Kitchen Cabinet," a group known for its financial largesse.

It included the likes of Henry Salvatori, Holmes Tuttle and Jack Wrather. There was plenty of big oil clout from Reagan's advisers.

The Reagan two term stewardship in California spoke common sense populism and containing government costs while actually running up deficits and providing Californians with frequent tax increases.

It was up to Reagan's successor Jerry Brown to take up the "less government can be better" to bring the state back to the consistent growth, keep government costs reasonable that his father, known as Pat Brown Sr., had delivered in fact while the Spencer-Roberts public relations machine fuzzed up reality.

California liberals used to make a joking reference to Reagan becoming president so they could "share him with the other forty-nine states."

That one-liner became a brutal reality once more masqueraded as a Citizen Politician II campaign with another faux paradigm shift. This occurred once more during a troubled time for a Democratic incumbent.

President Jimmy Carter was embroiled in an economy-wrenching oil embargo coupled with a devastating prestige loss for America due to an unsuccessful attempt to rescue hostages being held by the Ayatollah Khomeini regime in Iran.

Spencer rolled up his sleeves anew and sought to market Reagan as a moderate citizen politician who would change the face of Washington. When all the smoke cleared at the end of two presidential terms Reagan had tripled the national debt and traded arms for hostages with the same Khomeini regime in Iran with which he promised to "get tough."

It was the marketing that was innovative and repetitious. In reality Reagan in California and Washington, D.C. functioned as spokesperson and caretaker of a "trickle down economics" government that took credit for efficiency while profligacy was the painful, all too realistic result.

This repetitiously marketed faux limited government, friend of the taxpayer paradigm drummed into the consciousness of millions of Americans is now being reversed by Bararck Obama and the new administration.

It is being reversed in the same way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did with the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover school of "trickle down economics."