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.

America Duped on British Terror Plot

The story of the British liquid-bombers is quickly falling apart, not that the Times or the Post is taking any notice.

1. First comes the NBC report that many of the accused hijackers did not own passports, thus making them ineligible to board an international flight (Remember, Michael Chertoff said that "We were really getting quite close to the execution phase" of the plot);
2. NBC also reports that the U.S. pressured Britain to arrest the plotters earlier than they had otherwise wanted;
3. The only statement that the accused were planning to use liquid explosives on planes came from an accused murderer who was on the run in Pakistan and subsequently tortured;
4. The explosive the plotters were supposed to be using was identified by government officials to be TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, which as Thomas C. Greene explains, is extremely volatile during preparation, requires carefully controlled conditions to properly mix, including refrigeration (difficult to do in "false-bottomed sports drink bottles") and would require an extremely large quantity in order to damage an aircraft. The idea that a) sufficient quantities of TATP precursors could be smuggled aboard and b) it could be successfully mixed without either blowing up or overcoming the would-be terrorist with its fumes is preposterous.

Folks, this plot was never a plot. National security is being used as a political football, and the media, which could take this nonsensical story to pieces with a couple of days of research, is silent.

Wa. Post Softens George Allen's Racist Past

In a story tracking Virginia Senator George Allen's post-macaca moment, the Washington Post acknowledges that "charges of racial insensitivity... have dogged him for years as governor, senator and now presidential hopeful" but, in chronicling those charges, omits the worst of the evidence against Allen and softpedals the rest.

The story deals with George Allen's alleged racism by balancing two nasty anecdotes against two of Allen's supposed attempts at atonement:

Meanwhile, Allen's past -- which includes a youthful admiration of the Confederate flag and an office that once displayed a noose -- lurched back into the public spotlight during the Republican's senatorial battle against Webb, a Navy secretary during the Reagan administration.

During the past two years, as Allen has flirted with the idea of running for president in 2008, he has introduced symbolic anti-lynching legislation in the Senate and promised to lead the charge for an official apology for slavery. Political pundits who follow Allen closely said the new comments threaten that well-planned effort.

But Allen's closet has more skeletons than that. Not only was that noose hanging from a tree in Allen's law office, but while governor of Virginia, Allen proclaimed a "Confederate Heritage Month" by calling the civil war "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights" but making no mention of slavery. He also called the NAACP an "extremist group," opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act, as a state legislator was against creating a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and prominently displayed a Confederate Flag in his living room. Three previous Virginia governors had turned down invitations to membership in a Richmond social club with a publicized history of racism; George Allen accepted. And all this from a guy who grew up wealthy in California. (Thanks to Brendan Nyhan for publicizing his research on Allen; see also a New Republic profile for more.)

Apparently George Allen has been able to get away with this kind of talk with Virginians, and thinks it will fly in a presidential run. And if he keeps getting media coverage like this, it very well might.

Latest Assault on Katrina Victims

When is a storm not a storm? When it causes "flood" damage, according to a federal judge in Mississippi. A family whose policy protected them against storms, but not floods, was denied compensation by their insurer from damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, a decision that U. S. District Court Judge L. T. Senter, Jr. upheld today. The clause that Nationwide Insurance used to deny family's claim the judge admitted was ambiguous, but he nevertheless ruled that the policy the plaintiffs purchased against storms did not cover "wind-driven water damage." The ruling will likely affect, at minimum, hundreds of similar cases along the Gulf Coast, particularly since it is Judge Senter who oversees all Katrina-related insurance claims in the state of Mississippi.

The relevant clause in the Nationwide storm policy is below, asserting that the policy does not cover:

Water or damage caused by water-borne material. Loss resulting from water or water-borne material damage described below is not covered even if other perils contributed, directly or indirectly to cause the loss. Water and water-borne material means

1) flood, surface water, waves, tidal waves, overflow of a body of water, spray from these, whether or not driven by the wind.

A "storm," then, according to the judge's interpretation of Nationwide's policy, is wind, and ceases to be a storm as soon as it is accompanied by water. When water is involved, "whether or not driven the wind," then you've got a flood on your hands. No flood insurance? Sorry, no money.

Further, the insurance agent who sold the policy is admitted by the judge to have a pattern of discouraging the purchase of flood insurance, which presumably would be covered under Hurricane Katrina, while simultaneously maintaining to his customers (according to the plaintiffs) that the storm policy covered any storm-related eventuality, including water damage. Unsurprisingly, in light of the verdict, the judge accepted the insurance agent's recollected version of his sales pitch over the plaintiffs'.

The families affected by this ruling, many of whom are unemployed, with no savings, and surrounded by a community support structure in shambles, will now have to pay up to the entire cost of rebuilding their homes and replacing their property on their own. And while any undergraduate in economics could tell you how much more difficult Judge Senter's ruling will make it for these small, rural economies in Mississippi and Louisiana to grow again, Joseph Annotti of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America disagrees:

From our perspective, it lifts a very large cloud of uncertainty that has been hanging over the insurance market of the Gulf Coast. A healthy insurance market is absolutely key to a rejuvenated economy down there.

And no, he was not joking.

Breaking News: G.O.P. Loves Terror, Hates Dems

In their second story in two days framing the terror arrests in Britain as an unqualified boon for the Republican Party, the New York Times cites the issuance of "a flood of e-mail messages" by Congressional Republicans "hailing the breakup of the plot, and crediting the administration's anti-terror effort" without noting out that the Bush administration had no operational involvement in Britain's supposed disruption of the plot.

The story directly quotes Republicans ten times (out of twenty-nine paragraphs), while quoting Democrats twice. Even while acknowledging that Democrats were making "a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack," the story makes no supportive attribution. It's worth emphasizing: the story leaves Democrats voiceless, but quotes directly from Republican talking points:

The Republican talking points, reviewed by Mr. Rove and Sara Taylor, the White House political director, went out to state committees across the country, with statements like "Ned Lamont's victory over a distinguished public servant like Joe Lieberman represents the end of a tradition of proud Democrat leaders in the mold of F.D.R., Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and J.F.K."

And finally, calling Lamont's victory in Connecticut an opening for the GOP to paint "Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security," the story fails to characterize the sixty percent of Americans who want the troops to come home as a political problem for Republicans.

UPDATE: Did the Bush administration pressure the Brits to arrest the suspects sooner than British authorities wanted? NBC says yes; Britain wanted to spend more time learning about the plotters, their backers and their methods (some didn't even have passports yet), but the U.S. threatened to kidnap a key suspect from Pakistan if Britain didn't start making arrests before Connecticut's Democratic primary. Part of the motivation for moving up the schedule for the arrests, NBC also says, was that Britain wanted the suspects to be in British rather than American custody, so they would have access to due process. (The British are turning out to be better Americans than we are.)

If true, of course, this would put to the lie the Bush administration's repeated assertions that they hold our safety above all else. If the threat was indeed not imminent, as the Brits assert, who in their right mind would turn down the opportunity to learn more about the terrorists' network?

In Lamont vs. Lieberman, Top Dems Choose Democracy

Has anyone else noticed the accidental farce behind stories like the Washinton Post's "Democratic Leadership Welcomes Lamont" and the New York Times' "Day After Win, Lamont Gets Strong Support from Leaders"?

Let me get this straight: Registered Democratic voters in Connecticut chose Ned Lamont as their representative in a primary election over Joe Lieberman, and the news of the day is that Democratic leaders will support the winner, rather than the loser, of that election. You mean, political leaders are supporting the will of voters rather than backing a powerful, wealthy, and well-connected friend?

Come to think of it, maybe that is front page news after all.

Was Cindy Sheehan Really "Unsuccessful"?

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times has shown up in these pages before. This time Stolberg takes on the one-person peace movement that is Cindy Sheehan, as she returns to Crawford in time to get within shouting distance of the president during his vacation, and to mark the first anniversary of the antiwar protests she started. Whether you agreed or disagreed with her, it's indisputable that Sheehan electrified the country during her peace vigil last year, sparking hours of prime-time news coverage, hundreds of inches of written copy, and a best selling book. Somewhat odd, then, to see the specter of "unsuccessful" placed next to Sheehan's name no fewer than three times in the Times' story on her.

• "A Year After March Against Iraq War, Another Try" (headline)
• "Cindy Sheehan, second from right, a war protester whose son died in Iraq, marched with supporters Sunday near the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex., a year after she demanded, unsuccessfully, to meet the president" (photo caption).
• "It was the first anniversary of her much-publicized march down a winding country road to the Bush ranch where she demanded, unsuccessfully, to meet the president" (second paragraph).

Never mind the forty-five minutes Sheehan spent with the national security advisor and the White House deputy chief of staff last year, or the president's two public mentions of her, or the sixteen members of Congress who petitioned the president to meet with her, or that she single-handedly made it acceptable for military families to come out against the Iraq war. It's so much simpler to say that she was "unsuccessful."

Another Rumsfeld Lie Swept Under the Carpet

Senator Clinton grilled Secretary Rumsfeld today over his inaccurate portrayals, during the past three years, of the security situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post insufficiently reported the moment, characterizing it as a just another catfight and glossing over Rumsfeld's latest lie, a whopper so egregious as to be nearly invisible. Read the transcript of the exchange and then see how it was reported by the Times and the Post.

Clinton: There's a track record here. This is not 2002, 2003, 2004-5, when you appeared before this committee, and made many comments, and presented many assurances that have, frankly, proven to be unfulfilled.

Rumsfeld: Senator, I don't think that's true. I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words. And you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic. I understand this is tough stuff.

Apparently Rummy has still not heard of the internet, where any goober with Google can suss out statements of his like this one from 2003: "It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Or this from the same year: "[t]here is no question but that [American forces] would be welcomed" by the civilian population of Iraq.

Rumsfeld was ripped apart by Clinton, but you'd never know it from reading the papers. The Times summarizes the Clinton-Rumsfeld match this way:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, accused Mr. Rumsfeld of being inconsistent over the months in his assessment of the military situation.

"Senator, I don't think that's true," Mr. Rumsfeld said, declaring that the senator would have "a dickens of a time" documenting her assertion. But Senator Clinton did not back down, and she said she would introduce evidence of her assertion into the committee record.

But Clinton didn't accuse the Rumsfeld of being "inconsistent." She accused him of being an untrustworthy liar and a thoroughly incompetent Secretary of Defense. "Under your leadership," she said, "there have been numerous errors in judgment that have led us to... a full fledged insurgency and full blown sectarian conflict in Iraq." "You underestimated the nature and strength of the insurgency, the sectarian violence, and the spread of Iranian influence," she continued, finishing with "you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?"

Though easy enough to do, no one at the Times bothers to dig up any of the many published comments of Rumsfeld that would disprove his assertion, and the Post's story says only that "under tough questioning by Sen. Hillary Clinton about previous appearances before the committee, he denied that he had ever 'painted a rosy picture' of the situation in Iraq."

Coverage of Lebanese War Grossly Inaccurate

In the wake of this week's death of 57 civilians at Qana as a result of seven hours of Israeli bombing, the Israeli army characterized the 48 hour pause in its bombardment of Lebanon as a "partial suspension of aerial activity." (Someone in the IDF has been studying their Orwell, no?) The New York Times, in their turn, reports this as "Israel Agrees to Temporary Suspension of Aerial Activities."

I'm still looking for the link, but one story yesterday in the Times reported that "scores" of Lebanese civilians have died so far as a result of Israel's bombing. But to date, over 350 civilians have died (one third of them children). The primary and most commonly accepted meaning of "scores," you might remember, is "units of twenty." A more appropriate use of the descriptor "scores" in reference to the war on Lebanon would be "scores of Lebanese civilians were killed in a single bombing raid today," or "scores of Lebanese civilians were buried in mass graves" (both actual news stories).

Other recent selections from the Times' coverage of the war on Lebanon include "Up to 7,000 Israeli Troops Push Into Lebanon" (whatever you do, don't say "invade") and "Bush Sticks to Call for Lasting Mideast Peace" (this is what you say about the president who refuses to call for a ceasefire, I guess.) That story comes complete with a subhead characterizing the Lebanese war as a "Broader Global Struggle," a phrase lifted straight from Bush's "War on Terror" media playbook.