October 2006 Archives

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The Big Chill

October 27, 2006 06:21 PM

NOTE: If you are reading this report, it's because you have been authorized to receive transmissions on my encrypted samizdat network.

America shares 53rd place with Botswana, Croatia and Tonga in the latest "press freedom" index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders and released this week.

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism. [My italics]

Yup, that sounds accurate. I'm sure they're anxiously shredding files over at Salon and The Nation as they wait for the FBI's elite anti-criticism squad to raid. That'll teach them not to place scare quotes around "War on Terror"! (Nice touch: "[H]is 'war on terrorism.'" It's like "His Lionel train set hobby-kit with scale-model villages in the basement.")

According to RSF, journalists would be much better off in Finland, which ranked at the top of the survey. The downside, I guess, is that they'd be limited to reporting about wood crafts and suicides. In terms of your country's press freedom score, it helps if the country doesn't have much that is pressing for the press to report. Not to take anything away from Finland, of course - or Iceland (tied at No.1), which also appears to have discovered the correct balance between press freedom and national security.

And of course there's always France.

France (35th) slipped five places during the past year, to make a loss of 24 places in five years. The increase in searches of media offices and journalists’ homes is very worrying for media organisations and trade unions. Autumn 2005 was an especially bad time for French journalists, several of whom were physically attacked or threatened during a trade union dispute involving privatisation of the Corsican firm SNCM and during violent demonstrations in French city suburbs in November. [My italics]

Sounds ideal. What's a few government raids, when you might otherwise be suspiciously regarded in the U.S.? But remember, when you travel to Europe, bring along due respect for the The Prophet:

A French high school philosophy teacher and author who carried out a scathing attack against the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in a newspaper commentary says he has gone into hiding under police protection after receiving a series of death threats, including one disseminated on an online radical Islamist forum.

The teacher, Robert Redeker, 52, wrote in the center-right daily Le Figaro 10 days ago that Muhammad was “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist,” and called the Koran “a book of incredible violence.”

The Redeker case is the latest manifestation in Europe of a mounting ideological battle that pits those who believe Islam and the Prophet Muhammad can be criticized in the name of free speech against those in the Muslim community who believe no criticism can be tolerated...

... “I can’t work, I can’t come and go and am obliged to hide,” Mr. Redeker told Europe 1 radio in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location on Friday. “So in some way, the Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the republic as if I were guilty of a crime of opinion.”

Mr. Redeker, who has kept in contact with news agencies by cellphone and e-mail, said that his wife and their children had also been threatened with death. He told Europe 1 that his wife was in hiding with him, but he was less clear about his three children, saying that one of them had been forced to move and that another was in a boarding school.

Asked to describe the sort of threats he had received, Mr. Redeker replied, “You will never feel secure on this earth. One billion, three hundred thousand Muslims are ready to kill you.” [NYT]

Unbelievable. A high school with a philosophy teacher? Only in France....

Link · American Politics | Europe | News Media

Kim and the Bogeyman

October 27, 2006 09:28 AM

From a BBC documentary on North Korea last night, I learned that North Korea is a thoroughly totalitarian state ruled over by an arbitrary and erratic regime that has starved millions of its people and enslaved the minds of the rest - but really wouldn't be much of a threat without George W. Bush. The "Axis of Evil" speech is depicted as a sudden interruption in the positive direction of relations between the two countries. The report notes that Bush also once referred to Kim Jong-Il as a "pygmy" - an occurrance which, even if true (and unhelpful), is hardly a legitimate excuse to detonate a nuclear device. Alas, this is all par for the course at the Beeb.

Link · Diplomacy | News Media | North Korea | Nukes | War on Terror

End the Search

October 21, 2006 05:18 PM

Decades may pass before the world is gifted a graf of pitch-perfect self-parody to compare with the following from Mrs. Norman Lear, posted in the HuffPo (where else?). Savor it.

When I asked Gore Vidal at dinner why the White House seemed so serene and at ease about the vote, he replied that, this time around, the Bush-Cheney henchmen could simply call on martial law. He glumly noted that we are so far down the road toward totalitarianism that, even if Democrats do win back the Congress, it would take at least two generations before the last six years of damage to the nation could be reversed. Gore frankly despaired that any amount of time could ever return the country to where and what it previously was. This prediction left me reaching for some Fernet Branca.

Link · American Politics | Humor

Secretary of Dense

October 11, 2006 08:17 AM

In the Washington Post, former Defense Sec. William Perry reminds us that we haven't properly thanked the Clinton administration for the "major delay" it caused in North Korea's nuclear program.

The most important such limit would have been on reprocessing spent fuel from North Korea's reactor to make plutonium. The Clinton administration declared in 1994 that if North Korea reprocessed, it would be crossing a "red line," and it threatened military action if that line was crossed. The North Koreans responded to that pressure and began negotiations that led to the Agreed Framework. The Agreed Framework did not end North Korea's aspirations for nuclear weapons, but it did result in a major delay. For more than eight years, under the Agreed Framework, the spent fuel was kept in a storage pond under international supervision.

Then in 2002, the Bush administration discovered the existence of a covert program in uranium, evidently an attempt to evade the Agreed Framework. This program, while potentially serious, would have led to a bomb at a very slow rate, compared with the more mature plutonium program. Nevertheless, the administration unwisely stopped compliance with the Agreed Framework. In response the North Koreans sent the inspectors home and announced their intention to reprocess. The administration deplored the action but set no "red line." North Korea made the plutonium. [My italics]

Oy. Maybe, in 1994, one could believe that the threat of "military action" drew the North Koreans to the bargaining table. But really: At what point does it become seriously delusional to believe the ensuing talks were an example of successful bilateral diplomacy, and not a rather crafty diversionary tactic by a rogue regime that never had any intention of halting its nuclear program and played the U.S. government for fools?

I say 2002 is the cut-off point.

P.S. A "red line" is only a red line if a plausible military option exists on the other side of it. Show us that Clinton "military" plan! I could use a good laugh.

Link · American Politics | Diplomacy | North Korea | Nukes | Nukes

Oleksandr the Grater

October 11, 2006 07:26 AM

Readers of this blog will recall that the gradual rupture of the so-called Orange coalition began last year with the resignation of Oleksandr Zinchenko - a Tymoshenko loyalist - as the president's chief of staff. At a press conference, he dramatically charged three of Yushchenko's top lieutenants, including security chief Petro Poroshenko, with unspecified "corruption."

Well, the allegations have fallen away, but Zinchenko has not. This week, he was brought back into the cabinet by Yushchenko as a top advisor. And you might say the move has not exactly delighted officials from the president's party (Our Ukraine), as the following report suggests. (Bear in mind that the translation from Ukrainian is not precise. "Persuades" ought to be "urges," for instance.)

Our Ukraine Persuades Yushchenko to Sack Zinchenko

translated by Irena Yakovina, 10.10.2006, 13:05

Our Ukraine Bloc (NU) pushes the President to sack Olexandr Zinchenko from the post of the President’s advisor.

It followed from NU Presidium statement, which reads:

“The Party Presidium considers that such an irresponsible politician who failed to cope with his task as head of the President’s Secretariat, has no moral right to counsel the President.”

Moreover Zinchenko has spread rumors that plunged Ukraine into crisis, split the ‘orange camp’, wrecked the state’s image and consequently caused outcomes of this year’s parliamentary elections.

Ukraine’s courts as well as the Special Inquiry Commission of the Verkhovna Rada have not found any evidences of Zinchenko’s allegations thus completely disproving them.

On Monday President Yushchenko appointed Olexandr Zinchenko his advisor. At that the President’s freelance advisor Olexandr Tretyakov unwilling to work with Zinchenko submitted his resignation.

Ukrayinska Pravda

Mykola Martynenko, one of the Yushchenko aides accused by Zinchenko, was somewhat more circumspect, telling Pravda, “Viktor Andriyovych (Yushchenko) is a great humanist and gives a chance even to people who made many mistakes."

Then he ate a stick of butter.

Link · Ukraine

Anna Politkovskaya

October 10, 2006 06:59 AM

There has been much written in the last two days about the despicable murder of Anna Politkovskaya - an act as depraved as it was, alas, predictable in Vladimir Putin's Russia. For its implications, one could do worse than this analysis by the always thoughtful Ron Rosenbaum. You may quarrel with his conclusions - even he does - but you cannot help but share his exasperation. The obituary from Novaya Gazeta, her newspaper, bears reprinting in full:

ANYA

On Saturday, October 7th, Anna Politkovskaya, correspondent of Novaya Gazeta was killed in the stairwell of her home

Novaya Gazeta, Moscow, Russia, Monday, October 9, 2006

She was beautiful, and through the years became only more beautiful. Do you do know why? At first we merely receive our countenance from God, and then the rest we make of it ourselves in the way that we live.

Still, they say that in maturity the soul begins to appear on face. Her soul was beautiful.

She was feminine. She knew how to laugh and joke and cry from injustice. Any injustice, no matter with respect to whom, she took as her personal enemy, and she fought it with all her strength.

She was amazingly courageous, much more courageous than those many macho types in their armored jeeps, surrounded by bodyguards.

They threatened her, they tried to intimidate her, and arranged shadows and searches. She was arrested in Chechnya by "our own" airborne forces, and they threatened to shoot her.

They poisoned her when she flew to Beslan. She clawed her way back to life, and, though afterwards she was never really as healthy as before, her conscience was all the stronger.

Many people, even well-wishers of Novaya Gazeta, now and then said: "Well, your Politkovskaya - she's too much already..." Not too much! She always wrote the truth.

It is another matter that this truth was frequently too terrible, that many people's consciences refused to accept it. And so, as a protective reaction, they said she was "too much already." Sometimes even our editorial staff.

For the average person, probably, the most difficult thing is to turn away from a terrible fact. But, if we were to look evil directly in the eye, it cannot remain; it will pass.

Anya looked evil directly in the eye, and, perhaps, she remained the conqueror in the worst situations. Perhaps she remained alive where her lowered eyes would have meant her death.

For us she is still alive. We will be never accept the death of our Anya. Whoever undertook this brutal murder - in the center of Moscow, in broad daylight, we ourselves will search for the killers. We have a good idea where they can be located...

In Europe, and in America, right now the question is being discussed: what is the state of the independent media in Russia? Novaya Gazeta in recent years has had three of its leading journalists murdered.

Igor Domnikov. His killers - because of the efforts of honest detectives and this newspaper - were brought to court.

Yuri Shchekochihin. Even the authorities in his homeland refused to look at the results of his autopsy... but we are continuing our investigation, and his killers will be punished.

Now they have taken our Anya Politkovskaya... They killed not just a
journalist, not just a human rights advocate, or a citizen, they killed a beautiful woman and mother.

While there is still a Novaya Gazeta, her killers will not sleep quietly.

[Hat Tip: Morgan Williams & Action Ukraine Report]

Link · Journalism | Russia | Ukraine

My two cents

October 3, 2006 06:37 AM

Let me say a word or two about Mark Foley, since I knew him well - professionally, never socially - for most of the 10 years I spent covering Congress in Washington.

Our association began in the mid-to-late '90s, when I was writing articles for the Hollywood Reporter and Foley was elected to chair the House entertainment caucus. The caucus is mainly a policy group - some would say a mutual suck-up society - that serves as the main point of contact between Congress and Hollywood. (Like the constituents they represent, lawmakers are basically star-struck in the presence of celebrities. With all the competing issues, you wouldn't believe the attention a John Travolta could bring to German government policy on Scientology, which it treats as a scam.) Foley relished the job. It seemed like each day would bring a new press release or phone call from his office, announcing some new initiative or event. Piracy was probably the main issue at the time. It might still be. I recall at one point spending the better part of a day with Foley as he shepherded various entertainers from meeting to meeting in the Capitol. If for no other reason, I am grateful to him for my introduction to EmmyLou Harris.

As many, including Andrew Sullivan, have already remarked, it was an open secret in Washington that Foley was "gay." He never hit on me, though. Perhaps I was too old. (Andrew, for one, seems confused over whether Foley was gay - a tragic victim of "the closet" who was forced to extremes by his secret - or a "sexually predatory creep," which is today's depiction on his blog.) I also never got the impression that Foley was making a great effort to hide his "secret." The last time I saw him, a couple of years ago, he was driving an ostentatious, light-blue BMW convertible, top down - not the kind of car you drive when you're trying to keep your head down and stay out of trouble. And there was a young man in the passenger seat. Presumably an aide. But I recall one of my colleagues remarking at the time that the young fellow was probably Foley's most recent quarry.

In any case, his secret - at least the one people believed he was hiding - was hardly a secret at all. For one thing, it was widely known on Capitol Hill that Foley was "outed" by a small newspaper in his district before the 2004 elections. I recall that at Roll Call, where I worked at the time, we struggled over the question of whether and how this matter should be reported. If he was "outed," it would presumably be a factor in his bid for re-election. But did a piece in a free paper with a small circulation qualify as an "outing"? And even so, weren't we really looking at a personal matter that ought to be no one's business? There were external efforts to force the issue into print. At one point, I recall one of our reporters receiving a press release from the "Gay Democrats of Broward County," a putative political organization, announcing its "endorsement" of Foley for re-election. Efforts to locate the Gay Democrats of Broward County came up empty, of course.

Foley was deeply, obsessively involved in child endangerment issues. I doubt that anyone who encountered him on Capitol Hill in the last four years came away without some kind of update on the progress of this or that initiative. There's a sickening foreboding about those encounters now. But at the time none of this struck me as odd, even after taking into account his supposed homosexuality. For one thing, I've known a lot of gay people, and they're fiercely insistent about the distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia. For all I knew, Foley's legislative crusade was part of an effort to underscore that distinction - as if to say, to all those who "knew" his secret, that he was gay, not a child molester. But he was also from Florida, where the battle against child abuse really took shape due to the activism of John Walsh, father of Adam, the namesake of the legislation that recently cleared Congress. Covering Congress, you often find that lawmakers are obsessive about two or three things that really ping the radar back home. Take a look at farm-state lawmakers and ethanol, for instance. Because of the Walsh saga, I assumed that child endangerment was just one of these things - basic constituent service. And, of course, I remembered the intensity with which he worked as chairman of the entertainment caucus. He was an intense guy - always friendly, but intense.

It is inconceivable that Speaker Hastert was unaware of the rumors that Foley was "gay." It wouldn't have made a difference: There was no ostracism or banishment of Jim Kolbe, from Arizona, when he came out years ago. But the business about the pages - I, for one, never heard anything about that. And I don't know what Hastert might have "known," or felt that he knew. Hastert might have thought Foley's associations with pages - including the emails and messages he saw - were of a piece with Foley's more general weirdness. He should clearly have ordered the contacts to cease. But, one can also imagine the Speaker telling himself: Foley is the obsessive sponsor of legislation to protect kids. What are the chances he was abusing those he was working to help? A House Speaker isn't a psychiatrist.

I hope Foley never took advantage of an opportunity to abuse minors, though I suspect that is a vain hope. Experience tells us that people with deep-set perversions are nothing if not resourceful. It is likely that he has destroyed some lives. Foley undoubtedly went on a number of Congressional delegations (CODELS) abroad, and probably to some places where American money can buy just about anything. It's not only the Justice Department that has some investigating to do.

Link · American Politics | Congress | Journalism

Amen

October 3, 2006 06:03 AM

Victor Davis Hanson despairs of modern Europe. Who doesn't? But his piece today is still worth quoting at some length for the clarity it brings to the present circumstances.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation....

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque....

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression — out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing....

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past. [author's italics]

Can't add much to that.

Link · Europe | History | Modern Islam | War on Terror