born live love die

Ron Suskind says in an interview that the US kidnapped two children of the 20th hijacker to try to get him to talk.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And what happened to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?

Suskind: He was really the prize. He is the 9/11 operational planner, a kind of general in the al-Qaida firmament. He was water-boarded, hot and cold, all matter of deprivations, beatings, threats. He told us some things, but frankly things that professional interrogators say could have been gotten otherwise.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With waterboarding, the prisoner is made to feel as though he is drowing, even if he isn’t really at risk of dying. There are reports that Mohammed was a kind of unoffical record-holder when it came to waterboarding.

Suskind: With extraordinary minutes passing he earned a sort of grudging respect from interrogators. The thing they did with Mohammed is that we had captured his children, a boy and a girl, age 7 and 9. And at the darkest moment we threatened grievous injury to his children if he did not cooperate. His response was quite clear: “That’s fine. You can do what you want to my children, and they will find a better place with Allah.”

Sometimes, the most fantastic reports turn out to be fabrications, either willful, on the part of the journalist, or incidental, due to misinterpretation.  But kidnapping kids?  What have we become?

Some news reports say it all in the lead paragraph:

The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded.

How many?

The answers came Sunday from the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands.

Exactly where untracked weapons could end up — and whether some have been used against American soldiers — were not examined in the report, although black-market arms dealers thrive on the streets of Baghdad, and official Iraq Army and police uniforms can easily be purchased as well, presumably because government shipments are intercepted or otherwise corrupted.

Iran didn’t need to arm the Shia.  We did it for them.

Incompetent.

There will be a flood of stories such as this, and one theme will be a betrayal of trust.

Alone and in clusters, collars up to block the rain, thousands of people lined the streets on a gray October day in 2005 to welcome their warriors home. For 13 miles, they rose to wave, a few to salute, as the buses rolled slowly past. More than one tough Marine, homeward bound after a brutal tour in Iraq, shed a tear.

When they reached solid ground, still wearing their desert camouflage, the Marines embraced their families and embarked on the most jarring of transitions. They would discover in the following year that seven months in Iraq had changed them more than they could have imagined, guiding and afflicting them in ways they are still struggling to understand.

The stories will have data about post traumatic stress disorder.

George Wentworth, a Navy Reserve medic known universally as “Doc,” is the person Lima’s Marines call when the walls are closing in. At 11 at night, at 3 in the morning, in the darkness just before dawn, they dial his number. Once when he tried to squeeze in a long weekend with his wife, he felt he never got off the telephone.

Within days of Lima’s return, he abandoned his early goals of seeing no divorces and no domestic violence. He was not surprised: “You come back and, literally, you’re lost.”

Col. Charles W. Hoge, chief psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, recently told Congress that 10 to 15 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq have post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have symptoms of PTSD, depression or anxiety. The rates are higher for reservists, a distinction that appears to emerge months after troops return home.

Wentworth, who has taken calls from panicked wives and distraught Marines, said: “There’s no timeline for anybody to get over this. You look at Vietnam vets — some of these guys didn’t have problems until they retired from their civilian careers. And all of a sudden 20, 30 years later, it all came back to haunt them.”

The stories will have questions about the purpose of it all.

The next morning, Maj. Gen. Douglas O’Dell, commander of the 4th Marine Division, addressed the company and awarded medals to the families of the fallen. At 58, he keeps his gray hair short and his handshake firm, but tears ran down his cheeks as he faced the young widows, the parents and the children too young to understand.

Speaking later, O’Dell said that consoling those grieving a loss from Iraq was his toughest duty in his 38 years as a Marine. “Every one of them I have felt very personally. They’re like my kid brothers,” said O’Dell, a father of five whose own brother died at 17.

O’Dell believes Lima Company performed admirably, with guts and restraint, but was asked to do too much. That is as far as he will go. “These are not decisions I agreed with,” he said, “so I will not be on the record until I retire.”

And the stories will be about loss.

Staff Sgt. Steve Hooper tells of Marines swerving suddenly on suburban Ohio roads after spotting what in Iraq would be likely hiding places for bombs, and of Marines on an Indiana training mission refusing beef jerky because it reminded them of seared flesh.

When he is with his girlfriend, he does not discuss combat.

“I don’t tell her a thing. I don’t want her knowing a lot of things I did over there,” said Hooper, a quiet Bronze Star winner who talks often with fellow Marines. “Some people are proud of it. Some people wonder if God will forgive them for what they did.”

Hooper’s sharpest pain is the death of Cpl. Andre Williams, 23, his second-in-command and closest friend. Williams died while hunting insurgents not long after videotaping a message for his daughter’s sixth birthday. Hooper keeps reaching, asking himself if he could have done something, anything, to keep him alive.

These stories have been written before, about Vietnam. But they are as real this time as that time. Just ask the soldiers and Marines coming back.

Sebastian Mallaby continues to turn out good thinking, good writing.

In 1995 Francis Fukuyama came out with a book called “Trust,” in which he argued that a society’s capacity for cooperation underpins its prosperity. The same year, Robert Putnam’s famous article, “Bowling Alone,” lamented that the United States was depleting its stock of precious social capital.

His central thesis is that we are poorer as a society because our leaders, business and political, have squandered the social capital that is public trust. He ends with:

We’ve recently had a double opportunity. The boom of the 1990s boosted trust in business; the 2001 terrorist attacks boosted trust in government. But CEOs and politicians abused these gifts with scandals and incompetence. Such is the cost of corporate malfeasance and the Iraq war: Precious social capital is destroyed by leaders’ avarice and hubris.

Recently, John Ashcroft was on The Daily Show and he said something about trust. Jon Stewart added, “but verify”, and Ashcroft said, “That means ‘don’t trust’”. I wonder where the country would be if Ashcroft and the Republicans had brought in trust-based programs, and not faith-based programs, and spent their time in listening to the people, rather than holding prayer meetings and Bible studies.
Oh yeah, we are already supposed to have trust-based programs.

Garry Wills gets it going early and keeps it going.

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government?until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present. George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham’s ministry to the powerful. He was converted during a stroll with Graham on his father’s Kennebunkport compound.

This is a great article. (more…)

I think George Will is going to get his White House press pass canceled if he continues to write like this:

In a recent interview with Vice President Cheney, Time magazine asked, “If you had to take back any one thing you’d said about Iraq, what would it be?” Selecting from what one hopes is a very long list, Cheney replied: “I thought that the elections that we went through in ‘05 would have had a bigger impact on the level of violence than they have … I thought we were over the hump in terms of violence. I think that was premature.”

He thinks so? Clearly, and weirdly, he implies that the elections had some positive impact on the level of violence. Worse, in the full transcript of the interview posted online he said the big impact he expected from the elections “hasn’t happened yet.” “Yet”? Doggedness can be admirable, but this is clinical.

George Will is usually very careful to not tip his hand when talking about the White House, Republicans or conservatives.  Any negative criticism is often shaded with enough disclaimers to not be offensive, but still leave him the wiggle room to make a claim about his willingness to name the obvious.  Case in point: “this is clinical”.  Clinical what, George?  Spit it out!

What is not clear at this point is if George Will has washed his hands of this Administration because he was cleared to do so by the network of well funded conservative think tanks or by the layer of Republican operatives under Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman who want to toss those guys and their fellow travelers out so they can move up in the Republican Party hierarchy.

But George Will just said that Cheney was crazy.  Crazy!

One of the talking points being thrown around among the chattering classes is the idea of winning in Iraq.  The question that no one is asking is: what is a win in Iraq?  The previous answers for that were all over the talking points map, with some people saying that it was a functioning democracy, some people saying that it was security.  Those two points can be diametrically opposed, since you can have democracy without security and security without democracy.

The Bushites thought they had achieved victory once before and unfurled a banner proclaiming such on an aircraft carrier.  The Pentagon started to drawn down troops in Iraq.  Under pressure from neocons in the US, Cheney and Rumsfeld told Bremer to disband the Iraqi military.  And all hell broke loose.

Bush has been the cause of the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam.  Will Bush be tried also?

Martin Selig has given $1 million to the I-920 campaign, about two thirds of all contributions.  He had paid $790,000 to a signature gathering company to put the measure on the ballot.

Selig says he is not bankrolling the I-920 campaign out of self-interest. Like many wealthy people, Selig said, he can afford to pay estate planners and attorneys to minimize his tax liability. He said he had no idea how much his estate would owe.

Oh, really?

Washington’s tax applies to about 200 estates per year — about one half of 1 percent of all deaths, according to the state Department of Revenue. Estates worth less than $2 million ($4 million for couples) are exempt, and the value of property used primarily for farming can be deducted from the taxable estate.

The state’s tax rate starts at 10 percent and climbs to 19 percent for the largest estates. That’s in addition to the federal estate tax.

Washington’s tax was created last year by Gov. Christine Gregoire and the Democrat-controlled Legislature. The money generated — about $100 million a year — goes to a dedicated fund to pay for schools. A citizen initiative repealed a previous inheritance tax in 1981.

Initiative opponents say the estate tax helps make the Washington tax system more equitable. Because the state has no income tax, it relies heavily on sales taxes, which disproportionately affect the poor and middle class.

“We have to remember, the owners of these businesses have been benefiting from Washington state’s deeply regressive tax code for their entire work lives,” said Sandeep Kaushik, spokesman for the No on 920 campaign. “They’ve been enjoying a huge tax advantage for decades of their lives and have been allowed to escape paying their fair share.”

“Follow the money. Who is actually bankrolling this campaign? Is Frank Blethen a small businessman? Is Martin Selig a small businessman? Is John Nordstrom a small businessman?” he asked.

Opponents of I-920 have raised even more money to defeat it: $1.7 million so far. They, too, have relied on some big-money donors, including Bill Gates and his father, William H. Gates Sr., who together have given $285,000. National and state teachers unions have given more than $900,000.

This is one case where, if it is good for Bill Gates, it is good for me.

Rep. Boehner appeared on Stephanopoulos’s show and said this:

Let’s not take the problems in Iraq, the tough fight that we’re in there and blame it on anyone. We’re in a tough fight. Al Qaeda is doing everything they can to disrupt our efforts in Iraq, to disrupt the new government, creating more violence than anyone can imagine and defeating al Qaeda there is important, because if we were to pull out before we win, we will embolden every terrorist in every corner of the world and then instead of fighting them in Iraq, we’ll be fighting them on every street in America.

This was said with a straight face. Anyone with an IQ over 80 and integrity can see that Rep. Boehner is trying to rename the civil war in Iraq as a fight against al Qaeda. There may be some terrorists there, but the sectarian violence that is happening in Iraq far surpasses any al Qaeda action.

I doubt that the Madhi Army is going to be fighting in the streets of Topeka any time soon.

See the video here.

The Republican Party is trying to make the upcoming election turn on the economy.  Fox News has been trying to run their news cycle on it.  Early in the day, they run stories about how well the economy is doing, then have talk segments about it, followed by later talk segments about how the American public is somehow not able to see how well things are going.  The subtext is , “If you were as smart as us, you would get this.”  Undoubtedly some people parrot those talking points the next day when talking to friends.

Or not, to quote Jacob Hacker.

In my own research using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics — a survey that has traced a large sample of Americans over time — I’ve found that family incomes have become much more unstable since the 1970s; the gap between our income in a good year and our income in a bad year has expanded. Increasingly, it seems, Americans are living on a financial roller coaster.

Of course, roller coasters go up as well as down, so it’s tempting to think that the net effect of economic instability is a wash. But instability causes hardship even when the “average” experience stays constant. In their seminal 1979 article “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decisions Under Risk,” psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people dislike losing things they already have much more than they like gaining things they don’t have — a phenomenon known as “loss aversion.” As a result, losses in income are psychologically difficult even when followed by equal or even larger gains. And, of course, it’s on those downward trips that people lose their houses, their jobs, their retirement savings and other staples of middle-class life.

Loss aversion is surprisingly strong. In a recent nationwide survey by the polling firm Lake Research Partners, respondents were asked whether they preferred “the stability of knowing your present sources of income are protected” or “opportunity to make money in the future.” By a two-to-one margin, Americans chose stability over opportunity.

This helps explain why Americans are so dissatisfied with the current economy. They see the overall gains, but they don’t think that those gains have translated into greater security for their families, and they’re worried about the risk — whether it be the loss of a job, unexpected medical costs or some other setback. A majority of registered voters say the economy is getting better, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week. But more than three-quarters still say they are either falling behind or just holding steady. The actual or possible erosion of safety nets (such as Social Security, guaranteed pensions and workplace health insurance) only heightens such concerns.

Loss aversion may also help explain the muted public reception to Bush’s “Ownership Society” agenda, which was shelved after his proposal for private Social Security accounts crashed and burned (though, much to the dismay of Republican candidates, Bush recently said he wants to tackle the issue again). According to polls, many voters thought they would do better with private accounts. Yet they intensely feared the risks, such as a stock-market downturn or outliving their savings.

Given how spectacularly wrong politicians have been, people are right to be loss averse.