Dear Homeland Security: Firefighters Not Spies

It's a sad day for the major papers when it takes the Telegraph, a British joint, to let us know that the Department of Homeland Security has come up with the brilliant plan of asking firefighters to not only put out fires and administer emergency medical attention, but to act as agents of domestic intelligence. Valued for their ability to enter private residences and businesses without search warrants, DHS is reported to have begun a program training first responders in New York and other cities to screen the private homes and businesses they enter for chemicals, blueprints, flight manuals, and signs of "hate speech" or "hatred of and discontent" with the United States, including books. Firefighters are even instructed to report "little or no furniture other than a bed or mattress." I guess this means I need to make some more trips to Ikea and hide my copy of "The Shock Doctrine" before I dial 911 next time.

Multiple Choice Quiz!

This program began over a year ago and is:

a) just plain creepy;
b) yet another attempt on the part of this government to void the probable cause clause of the Fourth Amendment;
c) likely to degrade the effectiveness of first responders by adding responsibilities that have nothing to do with their job;
d) likely to degrade the relationship of trust between undocumented immigrants and first responders, making them even less likely than they already are to call for emergency help;
e) all of the above.

Remember, the fire department can enter any structure it deems necessary at any time-- not just to put out a fire, but for purposes of inspection. And according to one fire chief in Arizona, sharing imputed, hearsay evidence of the political beliefs of American citizens with Homeland Security is merely "the evolution of the fire service."

UPDATE: FOX, of all sources, reported this on November 25. Video here.

The Times and the Brothers Krongard

Please, if you can, try to get solid purchase on this Times profile of the brothers Krongard, an attempt to de-problematize the very problematic relationship between the Inspector General of the State Department and his brother, an advisory board member of Blackwater, the State Department's most important and most controversial private contractor. Never mind that Howard Krongard clearly lied about when he knew of his brother's relationship with Blackwater, or that Howard Krongard scuttled inquiries into Blackwater by State Department investigators. More relevant, according to Scott Shane and the Times, is that "[t]he story is less about cozy nepotism than about family estrangement," that "Howard appears to be estranged from several family members," and that when Howard phoned his brother during Henry Waxman's hearing, "it was their first conversation in months."

From a distance, events might suggest that Mr. Prince chose to recruit Buzzy Krongard to curry favor with Howard Krongard and blunt any inquiry into Blackwater. But if that was Mr. Prince’s strategy, his intelligence was gravely flawed, according to people who know the family.

“Whatever issues I have with my brother," says Buzzy Krongard, "I don’t question his integrity.”

As ringingly convincing as Buzzy's endorsement of his brother is, I'm still confused. How is any supposed lack of coziness between the brothers Krongard ("why, they haven't phoned each other in months!") relevant to Howard Krongard's increasingly lengthy list of serious ethical lapses? Are we meant to believe, based on the word of some very fuzzy reporting and Howard's own brother, that Howard Krongard's obstructive and negligent behavior as Inspector General when it came to Blackwater is not as bad as it's been made out?

Memo to the New York Times: call this duck a duck already. If the Saga of the Brothers Krongard looks like yet another example of BushCo corruption conducted incompetently, then it probably is.

Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures - full leaked document

The full Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures document, leaked to the net yesterday, is fast disappearing from sites like Wikileaks. I host the entire Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures here in the hope that it remains publicly and permanently accessible. I will post an MS Word version as soon as I can. In addition to Googlepages, I'm hosting it on FileDen as well.

Ryan Singel from Wired writes about the leak of the Guantanamo SOP document here. On NPR today, Single pointed out that, due to the continued anonymity of the founders of Wikileaks, some speculate that the site may be operated by elements within U.S. intelligence (presumably in order to sidestep the traditional middlemen of the media and leak whatever they want directly to the public). Tension and turf wars between the CIA and DoD regarding detention and interrogation techniques since 9/11 are well documented.

The "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures" may be the closest we're going to get to an accurate account of how Gitmo prisoners are treated. It may also add some valuable information to our understanding of the history of interrogation techniques in the "war on terror." The government has not responded to requests for comment on the document, but neither has it disputed its authenticity. Please post comments, highlights, and analysis of the document in the Comments section, or email me.

UPDATE: The Pentagon has, in effect, now authenticated the SOP document in a brief statement. While asserting that "many SOP changes" related to Gitmo have taken place since 2003, none are specified.

Gitmo Goes on the Record, and It Isn't Pretty

Above and beyond the legal status of Guantanamo Bay and the possible torture of its detainees, of key interest is how many Guantanamo prisoners are actually a threat to the United States, and what the government is doing to determine who is dangerous and who isn't. Many commentators and politicians seem at peace with the possibility that, in the conduct of an aggressive "war on terror," a few innocent folks may be wearing orange jumpsuits in Cuba. But the idea of an American prison camp full, or even half full, of innocent people with no hope for release is rightly considered abhorrent. The United States must have a reliable method of sorting the guilty from the not, the dangerous from the innocent, else we lose our Constitutional moorings entirely.

The Supreme Court certainly thought so when it ruled against the Department of Defense in the Hamdi case, directing the government to provide access to federal court for Guantanamo detainees. "[D]ue process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker," the Court said. DOD responded by creating the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), a formal review that, according to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, is "a fact-based proceeding, whether the individuals detained by the Department of Defense at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are properly classified as enemy combatants and to permit each detainee the opportunity to contest such designation." The degree to which the CSRT effectively fulfills the requirements set down by the Supreme Court in Hamdi is important when considering whether or not the Bush administration is in compliance with the Court's decision.

Lead Gauntanamo Counsel Captain Pat McCarthy appeared today on NPR's Fresh Air to defend the U.S. military's capture and handling of Guantanamo prisoners. The factual claims offered by the government's lead Gitmo prosecutor were numerous and deserve careful response, but one error of fact committed by Captain McCarthy is relevant to the battle over CSRTs, a battle which more and more resembles a proxy war between the Executive and Judicial branches. NPR's Dave Davies asked Captain McCarthy about weaknesses in the CSRT from the point of view of detainees, and in particular about questions raised by the Seton Hall study, which argues that the review process created by the Pentagon in response to Hamdi does not meet the Supreme Court's requirements, and further alleges that most Guantanamo detainees were captured not on the battlefield of Afghanistan, but by Northern Alliance forces, as well as in Pakistan as a result of tips from local residents-- tips which were rewarded with up to five thousand dollars in cash. (The Seton Hall study, the first comprehensive examination of all publicly available data on Gitmo detainee treatment, has become the chief thorn in the Pentagon's side when it comes to the battle over Guantanamo.) Captain McCarthy responds by noting that the Seton Hall study was based on unclassified information, and refers to a "West Point counter-study" commissioned in order to rebut the Seton Hall report. McCarthy says that the "West Point" study is more reliable because it was "a government study," and that it drew from classified sources, which the Seton Hall study did not.

Captain McCarthy is wrong. First, the study was authored not by West Point, but by the Center for Combatting Terrorism (CTC), an independent research center hosted by the Social Sciences Department of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In other words, the CTC report to which Captain McCarthy refers was commissioned by the government, but not authored by the government. CTC Director Joseph Felter himself told the Times that his report was conducted without Pentagon supervision. Second, the authors at the CTC did not have access to classified sources, as Captain McCarthy asserts. The CTC report was primarily a methodological critique of the Seton Hall report, and was based on the exact same body of unclassified documents. While the CTC report does not constitute an official statement by the government, it nevertheless is regarded by the Pentagon, according to the New York Times, as a key salvo in the public relations battle over Gitmo. In fact, the report's statement that it analyzed the threat level of Guantanamo detainees by using "the extent of one's involvement, knowledge, skill-sets, social connectivity and commitment to furthering violent Jihad" may constitute an attempt to short-circuit criticism of the CSRT process by, in effect, conducting public mini-trials.

But possibly of even greater note is Captain McCarthy's admission that the real nature of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal is that of "a process by which the initial battlefield determination of enemy combatancy is confirmed. It doesn't actually determine that at individual is an enemy combatant, it confirms that the individual is an enemy combatant." Captain McCarthy's characterization of the purpose of the CSRT is in direct contradiction with the Supreme Court's decision and with the implementing directive of the Department of Defense. In other words, the government's lead attorney at Guantanamo Bay appears to have publicly admitted that the Combatant Status Review Tribunal is nothing more than a judicial rubber stamp.

The Bomb-Iran Laundry List

As ever, the Washington press corps is playing catch-up with the White House's twisted Iran war logic. Even WaPo's Froomkin is still referring to Bush's commitment to "resolving" the "Iranian nuclear issue" before he leaves office. The truth is, BushCo has moved beyond talking about Iranian nukes in favor of the new Iran Laundry List, which Secretary Rice revealed for the first time in full last Thursday when the White House announced the latest Iran sanctions. Similar to the Iraq Laundry List, the ultimate compilation of Saddam's sins trotted out as a counterweight to the paucity of evidence supporting Iraqi WMD, the Iran Laundry List is the administration's response to the weakness of the Iranian nuclear case.

While Washington is open to a diplomatic solution, Ms. Rice said, “Unfortunately the Iranian government continues to spurn our offer of open negotiations, instead threatening peace and security by pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to a nuclear weapon, building dangerous ballistic missiles, supporting Shia militants in Iraq and terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and denying the existence of a fellow member of the United Nations, threatening to wipe Israel off the map.”

In light of the stakes involved, Rice gives a whole new meaning to the "shotgun approach." Let's review.

1. Right off the bat, Rice signals the effective abandonment of the nuclear argument. As I wrote before, the administration is now saying that it's not so much worried about an Iranian nuke, but about Iranian pursuit of "nuclear technologies that can lead to a nuclear weapon." No timeline is specified because they know now the only date supported by the intelligence is so far off as to be meaningless.

2. As announced in Bush's speech to the National Defense University, we are now instructed to fear Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons," he says, "and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them... Our intelligence community assesses that, with continued foreign assistance, Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015." Bush artfully blurs the distinction between ballistic missiles, which he says twenty-seven countries have, "some of which are hostile regimes with ties to terrorists," and the intercontinental ballistic missile, a technology possessed only by the five most militarily advanced nations. And thus we hit two birds with one stone-- we get an even scarier Iran, plus justification for funneling more billions to that crusty bugbear beloved by Bush/Cheney, National Missile Defense, even as Bush acknowledges that the United States does not actually have a functioning missile defense system:

By the end of 2004, we had a rudimentary capability in place to defend against limited missile attacks by rogue states or an accidental launch. As new technologies come online, we continue to add to this system -- making it increasingly capable, and moving us closer to the day when we can intercept ballistic missiles of all ranges, in every stage of flight: from boost, to mid-course, and terminal... [T]he pursuit of ballistic missiles will ultimately be fruitless -- because America and our allies are building and deploying the means to defend against this threat.

3. The allegation of Iran's support of "Shia militants in Iraq" is factually supported but should be contrasted with America's support of PJAK, the Iranian branch of the Kurdish PKK fighting to expel Iranian forces from Kurdish-occupied territories, and with other U.S.-sponsored measures conducted within Iranian territory meant to destabilize Tehran.

4. Iran's support of "terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories" is broadly publicized, but as a reason to bomb and/or invade a country with its finger on half of the world's oil supplies, leaves a bit wanting.

5. And finally, Iran hates Israel. So does Egypt, Syria, Jordan and a host of other folks, but we don't see plans to invade them (yet).

This is a list the American public will see repeated ad nauseum for the next several months in speeches, op-eds, Foreign Affairs articles, and press conferences until such time as the White House decides we are ready to accept the idea of Tehran buckling under the weight of 30,000 pound bunker-busters.

We've Got Waxman, but Where's Lieberman?

WaPo has an in-depth profile of the investigative team and priorities of Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee and chief White House gadfly. Missing from the story, however, is any comparison to Waxman's Senate counterpart, and how he might be exercising his oversight responsibility. As it happens, it's Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, a man who becomes “angry when I hear about fraud or corruption in the spending of American dollars,” but somehow can't find the time to make it a priority.

TPM Muckraker caught on to this discrepancy by quoting Roll Call on the subject of why Lieberman has not used his committee chairmanship to conduct any oversight of the Iraq war:

“You’ve got to set your own priorities, and it was clear to me that other committees were going to pick this up,” said Lieberman ...

Still, critics say they don’t understand why Lieberman has not followed Waxman’s example, and they say his support for the war should make him more likely, not less, to hold oversight hearings.

“He supports the war. So why does he not investigate the things that undermine the mission?” asked Charlie Cray, director of the nonpartisan watchdog Center for Corporate Policy.

Worse, Lieberman defended his bizarre 2006 re-election bid by saying he was anxious to get back to wielding the chairman's gavel.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Primaries!

More than a year before the 2008 election and before a single primary vote has been cast, the Washington Consensus, for what it's worth, seems to be coalescing around a Clinton/Giuliani matchup. One key indicator is how the big papers direct their investigative resources, leading to articles like WaPo's extended profile on Giuliani's indoctrination into the world of conservative activism, and the Times' study of Hillary's managerial style.

Giuliani comes across as surprisingly pliable when it comes to ideas new to him ("I've got to tell you, I don't think he understands what the Steve Forbes flat tax proposal is," says one AEI resident scholar) under the onslaught of people like Grover Norquist, Norman Podhoretz, Steve Forbes, John Bolton, Jack Keane and Fred Kagan. Trying desperately to prove he's a "real" Republican and finding no welcome among evangelicals, Rudy has shacked up with the the bomb-Iran, supply-sider wingnuts, who for their part appear to have found a horse worth latching onto.

For her part, Clinton sounds like the kind of focused, data-driven manager that a certain 2000 presidential candidate from Texas promised he would be. From the Times we learn that:

[Clinton] presides over an office of intense and focused workaholics, protective of their patron and wary of outsiders, a trait that has drawn comparisons to the leadership team of George W. Bush. The president surrounded himself with advisers who went back to his Texas days and were similarly lauded for loyalty and criticized for insularity.

Unsourced, passive-voice characterizations like one this bug me. Who, exactly, is drawing these comparisons between Hillary and Dubya's leadership team? Water cooler gossip? A recent book? Op-eds? The beltway commentariat? Or maybe a journalist on deadline looking for a quick and easy simile?

Is President Bush Moving the Goalpost on Iran?

In what is likely to be one of the few remaining presidential briefings of this administration, on Wednesday, October 15, George W. Bush unveiled a new talking point in the War on Tehran. And, like the other rhetorical shifts that proved crucial to clearing the way for the Iraq war, seems to be largely unremarked upon (other than The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias).

Wednesday's press conference by the president has already gained a reputation as being particularly quotable. Hay has been made of Dubya's glib reference to starting "World War III;" his statement that he is vetoing a bill for children's health coverage because "that's one way to ensure that I am relevant" in the face of his lame duck status; and Bush's dodge of David Gregory's question as to whether he approved of Israel's bombing of Iraqi nuclear facilities over twenty five years ago by claiming that he couldn't remember what he was doing in 1980: "I was living in Midland, Texas, trying to provide for my family."

But tucked among the president's charming patter was a curious and carefully repeated phrase, used whenever the subject of Iran's nuclear program came up. The president's moral outrage trembles not only at the prospect of a real, honest-to-God, functioning Iranian nuclear weapon, but at the idea that Iran may have knowledge of how to build one. In explaining why, for example, he wasn't worried about Russia's recent signals of solidarity with Iran, Bush explains that Vladimir Putin recognizes that "it's not in the world's interest for Iran to have the capacity to make a nuclear weapon." He later said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." Later he conflates the desire to be a nuclear power with possession of the same power: "I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace."

(And in a bizarre echo of Bush's attempts to justify the Iraq war by pointing to Saddam Hussein's tyranny, he includes a short disquisition on the failures of Iranian governance: "We're disappointed in the Iranian government's actions, as should they be. Inflation is way too high; isolation is causing economic pain. This is a country that has got a much better future, people have got a much better -- should have better hope inside Iran than this current government is providing them." Apparently the president's commitment to good public administration knows no bounds. Should we now expect the insertion of SEAL teams in to wayward central banks and ineffectively-run foreign ministries around the world?)

Remember Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, the point when he stopped talking about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and started talking about "weapons of mass destruction-related programs"? That shift in presidential language shares important characteristics with the shift the White House is introducing with respect to Iran, and both share useful properties. They were designed to be introduced into the nation's discourse quietly, invisibly if possible, and to appear to the average listener to be synonyms denoting the same thing: the bad guys are gonna hurt us. And both shifts have the effect of freeing the president's hands, something that Cheney and his functionaries have been demanding for years.

The idea that possession of a nuclear weapon is coequal with the knowledge of how to build one is ridiculous, of course. The first assertion, that the bad guys have a gun pointed at us, demands a high degree of factual accuracy. Either the bad guy has a weapon, or he doesn't. The tweaked statement, that the bad guy has a yearning for a weapon, or has ordered the parts on the internet but hasn't gotten them, or is engaging in "weapons of mass destruction-related programs," is very different. It demands no factual accountability from the government other than "we know we're right, but can't tell you why." And as a legal standard used to ask Congress for war powers against a country that has not harmed us nor possesses the ability to do so, it's not worth the time it takes to vote on it.

UPDATE: The Post picks up on the shift, noting today that the president's comments "may have also signaled a shift in his personal redline in Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon. With most attention focused on the doomsday scenario he invoked, another part of his answer may be telling. Although in the past he has said it is 'unacceptable' for Iran to possess a nuclear bomb, Bush said Wednesday that it is unacceptable for it to even know how to build a bomb." The Post's story ends with the observation that "[s]ome saw his declaration as meaning that even 'knowledge' of nuclear bomb-making would be unacceptable. 'They have just redefined the nature of the problem,' said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council official under Bush."

Times Silent on Latest White House/Rule of Law Controversy

Unless the New York Times is hard at work on some groundbreaking assessment of the White House's latest attempt to define itself outside of the rule of law, I'm going to chalk up today as a big Zero on the Grey Lady's journalistic scorecard. I have yet to find any mention of what the Post chronicles today in great detail: the Bush White House's directive that the Justice Department ignore Congressionally-initiated contempt charges when they are directed against White House officials, as long as case is one the president doesn't want investigated. "A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," according to an unnamed administration official. In other words, according to one Democratic lawyer, "Because we control the enforcement process, we are going to thumb our nose at you."

While all of this is occurring in the context of the scandal around the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, the White House isn't stopping there. They argued yesterday that Congress not only should be powerless to use its contempt power to investigate the current scandal, but that whenever the president decides to assert his executive privilege, the entire machinery of investigate justice in the federal government stops. To be more precise, the White House believes that Justice Department is forbidden from investigating White House officials any time the president decides he doesn't want them to.

Does this constitute a constitutional crisis? How does Bush/Cheney's present assertion of executive privilege compare with Nixon's view of the same? Good questions, which the New York Times apparently believes don't need answering.

U.S. Nervous Over Israeli Use of Weapons

Israel's decision to use highly lethal "cluster" munitions (big bombs which spray tiny bombs over wide areas) against Lebanese civilians has made some American officials nervous. The State Department has delayed a previously scheduled shipment of cluster bombs to Israel and opened a formal investigation into whether Israel was cluster-bombing "strictly military" targets in its most recent war with Lebanon. Such bombing violates longstanding secret agreements between Israel and the United States that Israel not use cluster bombs and other high-tech weaponry against civilians. The first such agreement with Israel was signed in 1976. The first Israeli violation of the pact that the public is aware of occured in 1982, and prompted President Reagan to halt sales of cluster bombs to Israel for six years.

A few questions were left unanswered by David Cloud's piece in the Times about the most recent investigation into Israel's war ethics. Namely,

1. Does the United States sell these types of cluster munitions to countries other than Israel?
2. If so, does the United States require these countries to sign similar agreements that they will not use them against civilians?
3. If not, what is it about Israel that prompted U.S. officials to require such an agreement?

The New York Times broke this story yesterday, but left untouched the larger question of why the United States has, for the past several decades, harbored special worries about Israel's committment to following the normal rules of war.

Glenn Kessler's story in the Post was the only one to remind readers that not only has the United States used cluster bombs against civilians many times in Iraq, but that the State Department regularly investigates allegations that Israel "misuses" weapons supplied by the United States, including "whether Israel misused U.S.-made Apache helicopters in its assassinations of Palestinian leaders" during the regime of Bush I. "[L]ower-level officials had determined that Israel had violated its agreements with the United States, but, the officials said, the finding was quashed at a more senior level."

UPDATE: Glenn Kessler of the Post tells me via email he thinks that the answer to the first two questions above are yes: "Each country has its own individual secret contract [with the United States] but as a matter of international law you can't intentionally use cluster bombs against civilians." Humans Rights Watch says that "although there is no treaty that specifically regulates cluster munitions," provisions in the Geneva Convention which prohibit targeting civilians are considered by human rights scholars to encompass the use of cluster bombs, and are "legal norms deriving from common state practice that bind all nations regardless of specific legal committments." Human Rights Watch is one of several organizations working to expand international law to address cluster munitions.

Although several different types of cluster bombs exist, the basic principle is the same. A large bomb releases in midair several hundred bomb "packlets," which scatter over a large area and detonate upon ground impact, scattering shrapnel. Because the shrapnel from ground-detonated cluster bombs travel at such high speeds, a single fragment hitting any portion of the body can rupture internal organs. According to some estimates, it's not uncommon for up to one-third of a cluster bomb's subsidiary munitions to hit the ground without exploding. Their lethality does not degrade over time, as children in Afghanistan or Laos, who often stumble upon and accidentally detonate unexploded cluster bomblets, can tell you.

Despite our own Marine Corps' statement that "cluster munitions are not suitable to fighting in an urban environment," Human Rights Watch notes that the U.S. in Iraq "not only targeted populated areas but also employed old models of submunitions, with dud rates of fourteen to sixteen percent or higher." This means that up to one-fifth of these thousands of deadly bomblets are now sitting, unexploded, on the ground in Iraqi cities.

All of which, of course, raises a new and more important question. If the United States has used cluster bombs in every significant armed conflict since Vietnam, as is widely acknowledged, and is using them today against Iraqi civilians, why is it angry when Israel uses them in Lebanon? Is it because the UN officials and non-governmental activists who discovered the hundreds of unexploded, U.S.-made cluster bomblets on the ground in Lebanon are making such hay of it? Is the State Department's investigation of the Israeli army a result of our committment to ethical warfighting, or just another exercise in public relations?

Juan Williams Drinks the Conservative Kool-Aid

NPR correspondent and frequent commentator Juan Williams manages to simultaneously channel Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Allen Bloom in an editorial in today's Washington Post. Williams opens with this whopper:

If systemic racism remains a reality, there is also a far more sinister obstacle facing African American young people today: a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.

Williams first doubts the existence of institutional racism, and then says that the beliefs and habits of black youth harm themselves more than systemic racism ever could. This is not only an astounding confusion of cause and effect, but a deeply warped view of black youth culture. John McWhorter first mainstreamed this kind of talk with his book Losing the Race, which argued against the importance of institutional racism in favor of "cultural" factors endemic to the black community. In so many words, McWhorter and Williams are saying, the African American community has, with self-defeating, failure-oriented attitudes, brought its plight upon itself. Williams writes,

[Black youths'] search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.

But as blogger Prometheus 6 points out, boys wanting "fast money" and fame, and girls being expected to flaunt their sexuality and procreate isn't unique to African American culture; these are the foundation stones of mainstream, white, American capitalism.

The black community is home to "a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior," Williams says, without recognizing the many-fingered hands of oppression that strangle most inner cities. A total lack of public and private investment in black neighborhoods (including redlining) lead to low job growth and crumbling infrastructures; a punitive and inflexible criminal justice system plus racist drug laws and police forces sweep black youth into jail by the dozens; school systems funded almost entirely by local property taxes ensure that good teachers, books, and other resources remain in communities of wealthy property owners, while bad schools in bad neighborhoods continue to yield bad students and bad citizens. Is any of this a surprise? Is it rocket science?

UPDATE: Juan Williams' new book "ENOUGH: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America -- and What We Can Do About It" is sensibly reviewed in the Post by Peniel E. Joseph.

Bush Boycotts Toronto AIDS Conference

In Toronto, the sixteenth International Conference on AIDS has just wrapped up, and yet another chance for the media to highlight the failure of U.S. leadership in the fight against AIDS has passed. With 26,057 attendees, the largest AIDS conference ever held gathered doctors, civil servants, and activists from tens of countries to compare treatment and prevention strategies, establish and strengthen relationships among researchers and scientists, and share news of their struggle with the world. And in a major slap in the face to the AIDS community, the United States sent zero high-level representatives to the conference. According to Democracy Now, the few lower-level researchers and scientists from the U.S. who were allowed to come were so cowed by the Bush government's stance on AIDS that they wouldn't even allow themselves to be named for fear of losing their jobs.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post covered criticism of South Africa's AIDS program by a U.N. official, but ignored the United States government's abandonment of the conference and the chill reception U.S. officials would have received had they shown up.

Trying to understand the fight against AIDS without considering the role of the United States is like talking about computers without mentioning Microsoft. The United States is the five hundred pound gorilla of AIDS prevention, treatment, and research: when that gorilla moves, the world responds, and to pretend otherwise is disturbingly naive. Consider this factoid from the Post's David Brown:

There was also disturbing news out of Uganda, which for years has been the African model of a winning battle against AIDS.

HIV infection rates at a sample of 24 prenatal clinics fell from 1992 to 2000. In seven, the fall has continued, and in seven it has leveled off, but in 10 it is rising. In a rural population sample, HIV prevalence in men rose from 5.6 to 6.5 percent in the past four years and in women from 6.9 to 8.8 percent.

The precise reason for this is unknown, but the researchers said it shows that prevention efforts must not let up.

But rising infection rates in Uganda are only a puzzle when you remove the United States from the equation. The Bush administration has demanded that AIDS prevention funds in Uganda (and many other African countries) be used for "abstinence education" and anti-condom propoganda, a stance that doctors, civil servants, and AIDS activists say only hastens the spread of the virus. Dr Jotham Musinguzi, director of Uganda's Population Secretariat at the Ministry of Finance, for example, says that "There are some prominent people in government, and some outside, who with the help of conservative agents in the U.S. are stigmatising AIDS, saying that only sinners use a condom. That is the message we are struggling with."

He's not alone. The so-called "ABC" approach (Abstinence/Be Faithful/Use a Condom) pushed by the United States would be the laughingstock of AIDS activists if it weren't so deadly. In a plenary session at the Toronto conference, Indian human rights lawyer Arnand Grover said that "President Bush and the US Congress need to be told that the so called ABC approach is killing people in the U.S. and in the rest of the world."

The sad fact is that the United States has lost most of its credibility among AIDS doctors, activists, government officials, and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. With the Bush administration's insistence that U.S. funds in Africa be spent on "abstinence education," coupled with its refusal to allow countries like Brazil and India to produce inexpensive generic versions of lifesaving AIDS medicines, its track record of lying about the effectiveness of condom use in stopping the virus, and its inability to confront the role that marital rape and gender inequality play in spreading the virus in Africa, the United States under Dubya has essentially abandoned the AIDS-infected world. Mainstream media leaders, who could do so much to contextualize the current state of AIDS research, prevention, and treatment by examining the impact of U.S. policy, have not yet done so.

UPDATE: I have a call in to Carol Thompson, Director of the White House's Office of National AIDS Policy, asking her to identify who the United States sent as their representative to the Toronto conference. Will update if I hear back.