By William Fisher
Jaleela AlSalman, Vice President of the Bahrain Society for teachers, and Rula AlSafar, President of Bahrain Nursing Society, are into the 12th day of a hunger strike to protest what they claim is their “illegitimate detention” in a Bahraini prison along with hundreds of teachers, doctors, and nurses who insisted on doing their jobs in the face of attacks and abuse from the government’s security forces.
The Bahrain Center for Human Rights charges that since the Sunni government’s crackdown on the Shia majority of Bahrain in mid- March 2011, many activists, professionals and unionists have been targeted by being subject to arbitrary arrest, physical and psychological abuse, torture, dismissal from their jobs, and prosecuted at military and later at civilian courts.
The Society says the two female unionists have reportedly been ill-treated in detention and are expected to be sentenced with false accusations. They were arrested on March 29 and their hunger strike started August 2. Their families reported that the two women plan to continue the strike until they are released.
Today, one of the hunger-strikers, Ms. Jaleela AlSalman, was taken to a hospital due to pains in the chest and deteriorating health, according to Maryam Al-Khawaja, head of the Foreign Relations Office of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
Ms. AlSalman, the Vice President of the Bahrain Society for Teachers, is a 46 year-old mother of three. She was a deputy manager in Saba Secondary School. Her school, which has won significant awards a distinctive school with many projects and initiatives, independent from the Ministry of Education, to achieve excellence of the educational process where she was been either leading those projects or amongst the active members of the projects teams.
She has worked towards development and growth of education for both teachers and student through participation in nationwide projects, the training of teachers for ICDL certification program where she was a pioneer and was among the project team of Bahraini King Hamad Schools of the future, in e-learning.
Bahraini dissidents report that, because of her work in Bahrain Society for Teachers as a Vice President, she has been facing pressure and warnings to leave the society and stop her work as an activist for teachers and students rights, in addition she got bypassed for promotions opportunity, but she continued to work for what she believed in and advocate for the rights of her colleagues and students.
After the start of the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on 16 March 2011, the leaders of the teachers society has become targeted by the regime for their calls to strike, first on 20th Feb as a protest against the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Pearl Roundabout and later on 14th March out of fear over the safety and security of the students and teachers after a series of incidents in schools that put the students at great risk.
Following the attack on the Pearl Roundabout – Bahrain’s Tahrir Square -- sit-in on 16 March 2011, and the start of mass arrest campaign, Jaleela was the first from the teachers society to be arrested on 29 March 2011. Her house in Northern Sehla was raided at 2.30am by around 40 officers from the security forces without any warning.
They broke in, went to her bedroom where she was sleeping without giving her a chance to wear her veil and arrested her at gunpoint in front of her kids whom are still suffering of nightmares at night recalling their mother’s arrest where “big weapons”, as one of them, stated was held to their heads. She was held incommunicado with no access to family or lawyer for weeks before her family heard of her. They were only allowed two visits, and even so were allowed to speak to her for a very short time.
Ms. AlSalman was reportedly ill-treated and tortured in her first weeks of detention, according to members of her family and fellow detainees. They say she was beaten and kicked, verbally abused and insulted, made to stand facing the wall for nights and forced to clean toilets.
Teachers are among the groups singled out for criminal misconduct by the government controlled by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Thousands of teachers have been fired from the public education system for their a”failure” to toe the party line in their classrooms.
The second hunger-striker is Ms. Rula AlSaffar, President of Bahrain Nursing Society. The human rights group says she is “an example of a Bahraini unionist woman dedicated and devoted Bahraini to developing the medical sector.”
Like the teachers, doctors and nurses were a specific target of the government clamp-down. The principal reason was that they were “guilty” of providing medical care to Bahrainis injured by government forces in the anti-Hamad demonstrations.
The government raided the main hospital, kidnapped the injured, arrested doctors and nurses, and prevented them from treating the sick.
The hunger strike "is a desperate attempt to protest against their imprisonment and the way they have been treated," said Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.
"Amnesty International is concerned that they are being held solely because they took part in protests, in which case they would both be prisoners of conscience who should be released immediately and unconditionally," he added.
Amnesty said the two activists started their hunger strike to protest their continued detention, while others have been released on bail.
At least 500 people have been detained in Bahrain since month-long protests demanding democratic reforms broke out in the Gulf kingdom. Amnesty International said. Almost 2,000 people have been dismissed or suspended from their jobs, it added.
These include not only doctors, nurses and teachers, but university professors and many of their students.
A so-called “independent” Commission has been tasked by the King to investigate crimes against humanity in the tiny Gulf Kingdom. But Bahrain’s pro-democracy spokesmen are attacking the international commission for “whitewashing” transgressions by the government and its security apparatus. Many of Bahrain’s protesting groups have threatened to boycott the upcoming Parliamentary elections, scheduled for September.
Press reports that The Commission had finished its work and had found no evidence of crimes against humanity were greeted with a large crowd of protestors gathering outside the Commission’s headquarters.
The Commission closed its offices and insisted its work is not yet finished.. The Commission is headed by Egyptian-born Professor Cherif Bassiouni, who has led UN investigations into alleged war crimes in Bosnia and Libya.
Meanwhile, Mehdi Hasan writes in The Guardian that Prime Minister David Cameron has greeted the crown prince of Bahrain, and a bit earlier it was reported that this same crown prince conferred with US State and Defense Department officials, and all the way up to President Barack Obama. And a bit later, American’s two most senior military officials visited Bahrain, which is home to the US First Fleet,
The Crown Prince reportedly told Obama he was concerned about “Bahrain’s image.”
Bahrain’s image is about the last thing on the minds of the men, women and children who are being arrested, imprisoned and abused.
The Guardian’s Mehdi Hasan again: “Pity the poor people of Bahrain. They have been shot, beaten, tear-gassed – and patronized.”
He continued: “On 7 March, at the height of the pro-democracy protests in the tiny Gulf island kingdom, a crowd gathered outside the US embassy in Manama, the capital, carrying signs that read ‘Stop supporting dictators’ and ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’
“A US embassy official emerged from the building with a box of doughnuts for the protesters, prompting a cleric in the crowd to remark: "These sweets are a good gesture, but we hope it is translated into practical actions."
It hasn't been.
Instead, while an international fact-finding panel keeps digging, and the government prepares to hold Parliamentary elections, there has been no let-up in the arrests, jailing and abuse of political dissidents.
The Crown Prince has plenty of good reason to worry about his country’s “image.”
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Egypt: The Education of the Generals
By William Fisher
While the leaders of Egypt’s revolution argue with the ruling generals about when to hold elections and when to rewrite the Constitution, many Egypt experts are saying that the problem central to the success of the revolution is being cosmetisized or irnored altogether: Overhaul of the government security apparatus.
“Comprehensive reform of the security state -- and specifically, the Ministry of Interior and its sub-organizations, the ‘bowels’ of Mubarak’s repressive state apparatus -- is crucial if Egyptians are to establish a democratic society based on the rule of law,” says one such expert, Samer S. Shehata, professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University.
Shehata charges that during the Mubarak administration, “ensuring the regime’s survival, not protecting the citizenry or upholding the rule of law, was its primary function.”
Speaking at a conference organized by Jadaliyya magazine, Shehata said, “Absent was the understanding that the police and the security forces more generally, are not above the law or immune from accountability. In fact, Habib El-Adly, the despised former Minister of Interior, now on trial, changed the police’s motto several years ago. The motto had long been -- somewhat ironically -- “the police in the service of the people.” Adly replaced this with an Orwellian-sounding slogan, “the police and the people in the service of the nation” (the old motto has since been readopted).
He explained: “Abuse by security personnel took both small and large forms: in daily interactions with the police, on the street, at traffic stops, and police checkpoints, to more serious cases involving torture and human rights violations. The arbitrary exercise of authority was widespread. In the absence of any real accountability, security officials acted with near impunity. Suspected criminals were routinely mistreated, especially those accused of petty crimes. Heavy-handed techniques were the norm. Police stations were feared by many. Few rights or protections were afforded, especially to those without connections or money. And corruption was endemic.”
Bahey el-Din Hassan, the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), recently declined the newly-created position of Deputy Interior Minister for Human Rights. He said he was not optimistic that the political context in which the post was created would allow it to have a real impact on the situation inside the Ministry of Interior. “On the contrary, it may only serve to cover up a still ugly reality that must be changed, a task which is beyond the capabilities of the deputy - and perhaps even of the Interior Mnister himself - to accomplish.”
He added, “The chronic human rights problem of the police and security establishment is too complex to be solved by the creation of a deputy human rights post in the Interior Ministry. Indeed, the problem is closely linked to the extent to which people realize the need for radical, far-reaching reform in the Interior Ministry and other state institutions and ministries. The experience of the last few months contains little to indicate this realization among the Interior Ministry, the Prime Minster, or the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.”
If Egypt’s “January 25 revolution” is to succeed, comprehensive security reform is required, he said, adding that making minor changes around the margins is unlikely to produce any positive change.
Unfortunately, he said, “there is little indication that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) or the current Minister of Interior is interested in undertaking such reforms.”
So far, he concluded, “The SCAF has only changed the name of the SSIS and made promises of further reform. More recently, the government announced the dismissal of several hundred high ranking officers, and the commencement of trials against officers suspected of murdering protesters. None of these steps address the structural aspects of the problem at hand.”
He told The Public Record, “Renaming the agency and promising some reforms is not enough. It needs to be disbanded.”
His recommendations:
“The Ministry of Interior must be placed under civilian control, as has already been suggested by a number of activists and civil society organizations. This could entail replacing the current minister (a basic demand of many of the July 8 protesters) with a civilian, preferably someone with a legal and human rights background.”
“Reform must also entail drastically curtailing, if not eliminating, the role of the security services in many aspects of public, private, and political life. The Ministry of Interior’s (and particularly, the SSIS) surveillance and authority was pervasive and extended to universities (overseeing academic appointments, research, and student groups and activities), media whether private or state-owned, business, labor (through the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation), syndicates, and civil society groups, not to mention political parties, activists, Islamists, and elections.”
“In addition to the measures outlined above, clearly established and effective institutional channels for citizen complaint must be put in place, to ensure accountability. Achieving greater transparency and oversight, particularly when it comes to budgetary matters, must be the guiding principles of any security sector reform initiative in Egypt.”
Finally, Prof. Shehata observed: “The primary benefit of democratic governance is not the right to place a ballot in a ballot box every few years. It is to live in a society governed by the rule of law, and characterized by citizenship, accountability, and the protections of basic freedoms (both, of course, are related). The ballot box is one particularly important mechanism for establishing and preserving such a society. This reminder could not be more relevant to ongoing efforts to advance democratic change in Egypt.”
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, agrees. He said, “The government also needs to reform the interior ministry to make sure it does not repeat past abuses by security services under its jurisdiction, and to initiate investigations of torture and other abuses by leading security officers. The need to move forward with investigations into the actions of officers from the now-dissolved State Security Investigations (SSI) division of the ministry is especially urgent -- the division was notorious for using systematic torture and enforced disappearance to obtain information.”
To prevent torture, government officials should establish civilian oversight of the police force, permit independent monitoring by civil society groups of detention sites, and create an internal unit to investigate torture complaints transparently.
“The justice ministry also should reform the process used by the public prosecutor to investigate police abuse, Human Rights Watch said.The vast majority of torture complaints never reach court because of police intimidation of victims and witnesses who file complaints, an inadequate legal framework, and delays in referring victims for medical examination. The government also should end the practice of relying on police from the same unit as the alleged torturer to gather evidence and summon witnesses. Instead, the prosecutor's office should control all aspects of these investigations, and bar police involvement in gathering evidence and summoning witnesses.”
It has been seven months since strongman Hosni Mubarak resigned the presidency. While the interim military rulers have made some progress in some areas, it has to be said that their performance has been less than distinguished – a lot less. It appears that those invidials and groups responsible for Mubarak’s downfall have had to pull the military rulers by the hair, literally every step, to achieve even the most basic reforms.
Meanwhile, people are still being arrested and detained without charges, legal representatation or trial. Civilians are being tried in military courts. Prof. Shehata reminded The Public Record that in March hundreds of people entered State Security offices in Cairo and Alexandria and found thousand s of files about all of their activities ... spying, "intelligence," surveillance and other bad things. There were reports of finding torture rooms. Men who were arrested duiring that period were abused, not by civilian law enforcement but by military police, who also subjected wwomen detainees to “virginity tests.”
And the so-called Emergency Laws are still in effect after 30 years. These laws, passed just after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, give the government sweeping police powers to arrest, detain, prosecute and imprison with virtually no due process.
(It comes as good news that Ali El-Selmy, Deputy Prime Minister, has told Al Ahram newspaper that the cabinet is planning to repeal the emergency law soon; in a meeting held on July 25 the Cabinet allegedly discussed laws and mechanisms to replace the law. The Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) has promised to eradicate the emergency law, but it may be worth noting that such undertakings have been proposed a number of times by the ruling regime.)
Now, all this should come as no surprise to those who follow revolutions and their aftermath. Most don’t work. The euphoria of victory is slowly and painfully transformed into frustration and anger with the glacial pace of change and then disputes among revolutionary factions that divide and weaken the opposition.
But think about it: The generals who rule Egypt now are all, for one reason or another, associates of the fallen dictator. In many cases, the older generation of ruling officers went to school and up through the ranks with Mubarak, looked up to him as the picture of the ideal leader, and accepted from him the doors he opened to become not only powerful, but wealthy. And while the younger officers may have shared less, they shared nevertheless, and learned lessons from their superiors.
But what they never learned was about governing. They learned about commanding. And If all you know is commanding, obviously you will get a command economy and a vision of government based, not on the chaos of democracy, but on the button-down, salute-and-accept traditions of military establishments everywhere -- and the disciplines that go with those traditions.
That makes the education of the generals the toughest short-term problem Egypt faces.
While the leaders of Egypt’s revolution argue with the ruling generals about when to hold elections and when to rewrite the Constitution, many Egypt experts are saying that the problem central to the success of the revolution is being cosmetisized or irnored altogether: Overhaul of the government security apparatus.
“Comprehensive reform of the security state -- and specifically, the Ministry of Interior and its sub-organizations, the ‘bowels’ of Mubarak’s repressive state apparatus -- is crucial if Egyptians are to establish a democratic society based on the rule of law,” says one such expert, Samer S. Shehata, professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University.
Shehata charges that during the Mubarak administration, “ensuring the regime’s survival, not protecting the citizenry or upholding the rule of law, was its primary function.”
Speaking at a conference organized by Jadaliyya magazine, Shehata said, “Absent was the understanding that the police and the security forces more generally, are not above the law or immune from accountability. In fact, Habib El-Adly, the despised former Minister of Interior, now on trial, changed the police’s motto several years ago. The motto had long been -- somewhat ironically -- “the police in the service of the people.” Adly replaced this with an Orwellian-sounding slogan, “the police and the people in the service of the nation” (the old motto has since been readopted).
He explained: “Abuse by security personnel took both small and large forms: in daily interactions with the police, on the street, at traffic stops, and police checkpoints, to more serious cases involving torture and human rights violations. The arbitrary exercise of authority was widespread. In the absence of any real accountability, security officials acted with near impunity. Suspected criminals were routinely mistreated, especially those accused of petty crimes. Heavy-handed techniques were the norm. Police stations were feared by many. Few rights or protections were afforded, especially to those without connections or money. And corruption was endemic.”
Bahey el-Din Hassan, the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), recently declined the newly-created position of Deputy Interior Minister for Human Rights. He said he was not optimistic that the political context in which the post was created would allow it to have a real impact on the situation inside the Ministry of Interior. “On the contrary, it may only serve to cover up a still ugly reality that must be changed, a task which is beyond the capabilities of the deputy - and perhaps even of the Interior Mnister himself - to accomplish.”
He added, “The chronic human rights problem of the police and security establishment is too complex to be solved by the creation of a deputy human rights post in the Interior Ministry. Indeed, the problem is closely linked to the extent to which people realize the need for radical, far-reaching reform in the Interior Ministry and other state institutions and ministries. The experience of the last few months contains little to indicate this realization among the Interior Ministry, the Prime Minster, or the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.”
If Egypt’s “January 25 revolution” is to succeed, comprehensive security reform is required, he said, adding that making minor changes around the margins is unlikely to produce any positive change.
Unfortunately, he said, “there is little indication that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) or the current Minister of Interior is interested in undertaking such reforms.”
So far, he concluded, “The SCAF has only changed the name of the SSIS and made promises of further reform. More recently, the government announced the dismissal of several hundred high ranking officers, and the commencement of trials against officers suspected of murdering protesters. None of these steps address the structural aspects of the problem at hand.”
He told The Public Record, “Renaming the agency and promising some reforms is not enough. It needs to be disbanded.”
His recommendations:
“The Ministry of Interior must be placed under civilian control, as has already been suggested by a number of activists and civil society organizations. This could entail replacing the current minister (a basic demand of many of the July 8 protesters) with a civilian, preferably someone with a legal and human rights background.”
“Reform must also entail drastically curtailing, if not eliminating, the role of the security services in many aspects of public, private, and political life. The Ministry of Interior’s (and particularly, the SSIS) surveillance and authority was pervasive and extended to universities (overseeing academic appointments, research, and student groups and activities), media whether private or state-owned, business, labor (through the state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation), syndicates, and civil society groups, not to mention political parties, activists, Islamists, and elections.”
“In addition to the measures outlined above, clearly established and effective institutional channels for citizen complaint must be put in place, to ensure accountability. Achieving greater transparency and oversight, particularly when it comes to budgetary matters, must be the guiding principles of any security sector reform initiative in Egypt.”
Finally, Prof. Shehata observed: “The primary benefit of democratic governance is not the right to place a ballot in a ballot box every few years. It is to live in a society governed by the rule of law, and characterized by citizenship, accountability, and the protections of basic freedoms (both, of course, are related). The ballot box is one particularly important mechanism for establishing and preserving such a society. This reminder could not be more relevant to ongoing efforts to advance democratic change in Egypt.”
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, agrees. He said, “The government also needs to reform the interior ministry to make sure it does not repeat past abuses by security services under its jurisdiction, and to initiate investigations of torture and other abuses by leading security officers. The need to move forward with investigations into the actions of officers from the now-dissolved State Security Investigations (SSI) division of the ministry is especially urgent -- the division was notorious for using systematic torture and enforced disappearance to obtain information.”
To prevent torture, government officials should establish civilian oversight of the police force, permit independent monitoring by civil society groups of detention sites, and create an internal unit to investigate torture complaints transparently.
“The justice ministry also should reform the process used by the public prosecutor to investigate police abuse, Human Rights Watch said.The vast majority of torture complaints never reach court because of police intimidation of victims and witnesses who file complaints, an inadequate legal framework, and delays in referring victims for medical examination. The government also should end the practice of relying on police from the same unit as the alleged torturer to gather evidence and summon witnesses. Instead, the prosecutor's office should control all aspects of these investigations, and bar police involvement in gathering evidence and summoning witnesses.”
It has been seven months since strongman Hosni Mubarak resigned the presidency. While the interim military rulers have made some progress in some areas, it has to be said that their performance has been less than distinguished – a lot less. It appears that those invidials and groups responsible for Mubarak’s downfall have had to pull the military rulers by the hair, literally every step, to achieve even the most basic reforms.
Meanwhile, people are still being arrested and detained without charges, legal representatation or trial. Civilians are being tried in military courts. Prof. Shehata reminded The Public Record that in March hundreds of people entered State Security offices in Cairo and Alexandria and found thousand s of files about all of their activities ... spying, "intelligence," surveillance and other bad things. There were reports of finding torture rooms. Men who were arrested duiring that period were abused, not by civilian law enforcement but by military police, who also subjected wwomen detainees to “virginity tests.”
And the so-called Emergency Laws are still in effect after 30 years. These laws, passed just after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, give the government sweeping police powers to arrest, detain, prosecute and imprison with virtually no due process.
(It comes as good news that Ali El-Selmy, Deputy Prime Minister, has told Al Ahram newspaper that the cabinet is planning to repeal the emergency law soon; in a meeting held on July 25 the Cabinet allegedly discussed laws and mechanisms to replace the law. The Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) has promised to eradicate the emergency law, but it may be worth noting that such undertakings have been proposed a number of times by the ruling regime.)
Now, all this should come as no surprise to those who follow revolutions and their aftermath. Most don’t work. The euphoria of victory is slowly and painfully transformed into frustration and anger with the glacial pace of change and then disputes among revolutionary factions that divide and weaken the opposition.
But think about it: The generals who rule Egypt now are all, for one reason or another, associates of the fallen dictator. In many cases, the older generation of ruling officers went to school and up through the ranks with Mubarak, looked up to him as the picture of the ideal leader, and accepted from him the doors he opened to become not only powerful, but wealthy. And while the younger officers may have shared less, they shared nevertheless, and learned lessons from their superiors.
But what they never learned was about governing. They learned about commanding. And If all you know is commanding, obviously you will get a command economy and a vision of government based, not on the chaos of democracy, but on the button-down, salute-and-accept traditions of military establishments everywhere -- and the disciplines that go with those traditions.
That makes the education of the generals the toughest short-term problem Egypt faces.
The Oslo Massacre
By William Fisher
If you’re one of those busy people who gets his/her news on the fly, as it were, in little dribs and drabs, you’d have been pretty certain that the guy who killed all those people in Oslo a couple of weeks ago was an Islamic Terrorist.
After all, aren’t they the ones who commit these unspeakable acts? And isn’t that what was being reported on TV and in the main newspapers?
Indeed it was. The first headline in New York Times, for example, said, “jihadis claim responsibility.” The BBC picked up The Times’ story line, as did the US cable networks and early wire service reports. These stories left the reader with the unmistakable impression that al Qaeda or one of its franchisees was responsible for the Oslo carnage.
One of the cooler heads in the media was Glenn Greenwald of Salon, who reported all of the above.
Greenwald also noted that Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post, said: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Moreover, there is a specific jihadist connection here: ‘Just nine days ago, Norwegian authorities filed charges against Mullah Krekar, an infamous al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who, with help from Osama bin Laden, founded Ansar al Islam – a branch of al Qaeda in northern Iraq – in late 2001’.”
What short memories we have! The tragedy of 9/11 has so consumed our consciousness that we have forgotten that Timothy McVeigh, that all-American malcontent, blew up the Alfred Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children 1995.
Also forgotten by most of us is the incontrovertible truth that most terrorist attacks in the US are committed, not by Islamists wearing suicide vests, but by clean-cut-looking Americans like Timothy McVeigh.
In fact, a 2010 study by The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) reported that:
· There were 80 total plots by U.S.-originated non-Muslim perpetrators against the United States since 9/11. In comparison, there have been 45 total plots by U.S. and foreign-originated Muslim perpetrators since 9/11.
· There have been least five incidents of non-Muslim violent extremists possessing or attempting to possess Biological, Chemical or Radiological weapons. One of those incidents occurred since Obama’s election. No such cases involving Muslim violent extremists have been reported since 9/11.
· Since November 2008 there have been 45 plots by domestic non-Muslim violent extremists. By comparison, there have been 22 plots by Muslim, U.S. and foreign-originated extremists.
· Muslim communities helped U.S. security officials to prevent more than four out of every 10 Al-Qaeda plots threatening the United States since 9/11. Muslim communities helped law enforcement prevent three-quarters of all Al-Qaeda related plots threatening the U.S. since December 2009.
Likewise, in Europe, of 294 terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009, only one out of 294 was perpetrated by "Islamists."
So not only was the Oslo bomber not a Muslim, he was a virtual caricature of what a 100% native Nordic male is supposed to look like, right down to his blond hair and blue eyes.
Which may help explain why “the West” – The Americas and Europe –failed to show the usual signs of the furious activity -- beefing up airport and other security, stepping up the gathering and analysis of intelligence about Muslim hate groups and lone wolf jihadis, and imposing new regulations to further curtail privacy and other Constitutional rights.
Yet Anders Behring Breivik was as much linked to a network as any of the Islamist jihadis. He is a right-wing Christian nationalist, and he fed off the plethora of websites dedicated to promoting Islamophobia, the end of immigration, and the supremacy of Christians with white skins.
As Glenn Greenwald reported, his “mentors” included some of America’s best-known Islamophobes and self-styled terrorism “experts” – Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Pam Geller, are all mentioned by name in Breivik’s “manifesto.”
"It’s clear from his manifesto that he was slowly withdrawing from wider civil society," said Matthew Goodwin, an expert on right-wing extremism at Britain’s University of Nottingham. "Online, he was certainly active in terms of far-right blogs such as Brussels Journal and Gates of Vienna. He had an extensive Facebook network and had built up substantial online links."
There will be those who are genuinely disappointed that Breivik’s name is not Mohammed ben-Brievik because that would confirm the legitimacy of their twisted ideology. And it would also help increase their book sales, web site traffic and speaking fees. Islamophobia is, after all, a thriving cottage industry.
Norway, it seems to me, is taking a more rational approach. The government has formed a Commission to gather the grim facts of the July 22 massacre. There may be some criticism of the police response, which appeared to be slow. There may also be some reorganization of internal security procedures to help prevent another July 22.
But when Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was asked how Norway plans to counter extremists from any part of the political spectrum, he replied: “With more democracy.” He promised that Norway would remain “an open society.”
Is there something we can learn from Norway?
If you’re one of those busy people who gets his/her news on the fly, as it were, in little dribs and drabs, you’d have been pretty certain that the guy who killed all those people in Oslo a couple of weeks ago was an Islamic Terrorist.
After all, aren’t they the ones who commit these unspeakable acts? And isn’t that what was being reported on TV and in the main newspapers?
Indeed it was. The first headline in New York Times, for example, said, “jihadis claim responsibility.” The BBC picked up The Times’ story line, as did the US cable networks and early wire service reports. These stories left the reader with the unmistakable impression that al Qaeda or one of its franchisees was responsible for the Oslo carnage.
One of the cooler heads in the media was Glenn Greenwald of Salon, who reported all of the above.
Greenwald also noted that Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post, said: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Moreover, there is a specific jihadist connection here: ‘Just nine days ago, Norwegian authorities filed charges against Mullah Krekar, an infamous al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who, with help from Osama bin Laden, founded Ansar al Islam – a branch of al Qaeda in northern Iraq – in late 2001’.”
What short memories we have! The tragedy of 9/11 has so consumed our consciousness that we have forgotten that Timothy McVeigh, that all-American malcontent, blew up the Alfred Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including 19 children 1995.
Also forgotten by most of us is the incontrovertible truth that most terrorist attacks in the US are committed, not by Islamists wearing suicide vests, but by clean-cut-looking Americans like Timothy McVeigh.
In fact, a 2010 study by The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) reported that:
· There were 80 total plots by U.S.-originated non-Muslim perpetrators against the United States since 9/11. In comparison, there have been 45 total plots by U.S. and foreign-originated Muslim perpetrators since 9/11.
· There have been least five incidents of non-Muslim violent extremists possessing or attempting to possess Biological, Chemical or Radiological weapons. One of those incidents occurred since Obama’s election. No such cases involving Muslim violent extremists have been reported since 9/11.
· Since November 2008 there have been 45 plots by domestic non-Muslim violent extremists. By comparison, there have been 22 plots by Muslim, U.S. and foreign-originated extremists.
· Muslim communities helped U.S. security officials to prevent more than four out of every 10 Al-Qaeda plots threatening the United States since 9/11. Muslim communities helped law enforcement prevent three-quarters of all Al-Qaeda related plots threatening the U.S. since December 2009.
Likewise, in Europe, of 294 terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009, only one out of 294 was perpetrated by "Islamists."
So not only was the Oslo bomber not a Muslim, he was a virtual caricature of what a 100% native Nordic male is supposed to look like, right down to his blond hair and blue eyes.
Which may help explain why “the West” – The Americas and Europe –failed to show the usual signs of the furious activity -- beefing up airport and other security, stepping up the gathering and analysis of intelligence about Muslim hate groups and lone wolf jihadis, and imposing new regulations to further curtail privacy and other Constitutional rights.
Yet Anders Behring Breivik was as much linked to a network as any of the Islamist jihadis. He is a right-wing Christian nationalist, and he fed off the plethora of websites dedicated to promoting Islamophobia, the end of immigration, and the supremacy of Christians with white skins.
As Glenn Greenwald reported, his “mentors” included some of America’s best-known Islamophobes and self-styled terrorism “experts” – Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Pam Geller, are all mentioned by name in Breivik’s “manifesto.”
"It’s clear from his manifesto that he was slowly withdrawing from wider civil society," said Matthew Goodwin, an expert on right-wing extremism at Britain’s University of Nottingham. "Online, he was certainly active in terms of far-right blogs such as Brussels Journal and Gates of Vienna. He had an extensive Facebook network and had built up substantial online links."
There will be those who are genuinely disappointed that Breivik’s name is not Mohammed ben-Brievik because that would confirm the legitimacy of their twisted ideology. And it would also help increase their book sales, web site traffic and speaking fees. Islamophobia is, after all, a thriving cottage industry.
Norway, it seems to me, is taking a more rational approach. The government has formed a Commission to gather the grim facts of the July 22 massacre. There may be some criticism of the police response, which appeared to be slow. There may also be some reorganization of internal security procedures to help prevent another July 22.
But when Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was asked how Norway plans to counter extremists from any part of the political spectrum, he replied: “With more democracy.” He promised that Norway would remain “an open society.”
Is there something we can learn from Norway?
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Book Review: Today's Most Un-Political, Un-Productive and Totally Hilarious Self-Help Book
Reviewed by William Fisher
If you happen to be one of those hopeful people who believe that the next
"how-to" book you buy will be your silver bullet, do not read this column.
You will not only be disappointed. It will cost you. And you could end up
broke and homeless.
I'm not clear on whether these were Brian Foley's goals when he wrote his
latest (actually his first) book, "A New Financial You in 28 Days – a 37-day
plan." I should have known that this was the most un-Kosher self-help book
ever conceived when I read its "Lifetime Guarantee," to wit:
If at the end of the life of the purchaser of A New Financial You in
28 Days! A 37-Day Plan! ("purchaser"), purchaser has not
achieved a "new financial you," purchaser is entitled to a full
refund. This guarantee does not apply to purchaser's successors,
heirs, or assigns. This guarantee may be void in the State of
Minnesota and in North Korea.
I should have known that author of Foley's Follies was a lawyer, in fact a
Law Professor. I should also have guessed he was a comedian, a stand-up
comic to be precise.
Only a lawyer would know how to write such a totally unenforceable
Lifetime Guarantee. And only a Stand-Up Comic would know how to con us
into buying this e-book by stringing together the world's funniest non-
sequiturs and laying them end to end around the globe.
It is only rumor, but I hear on pretty good authority that the last guy to
actually get through this modest volume threw himself off a bridge when he
failed to find logic in any single sentence of the book.
The note he left behind, written on a bunch of shriveled-up Confederate
banknotes, said he now knew how it felt to be James Joyce on steroids. He
noted that Finnegan's Wake was also considered a work of comic fiction
based on free association.
If you're determined to associate yourself with Brian Foley (and I strongly
recommend against it) here is a sampling of some of the comic fiction you
will find in "A New Financial You in 28 Days – a 37-day plan:"
Foley starts off Day One with a poem (a very versatile scribe, he):
A NEW FINANCIAL YOU
The roaches aren't dead.
The violets are through.
From this dank one-bedroom
Sprouts A New Financial You.
"Look around! What you see is Your Financial You. If you want A New
Financial You, you have to do something different. But you can't do that
until you know what you are doing now. Are there roaches in your
apartment? Are they dead? Is your apartment a dank, one-bedroom
apartment? If so, then you are ... probably living in my apartment. Get out!
Now! This is MY apartment!
"Now you are homeless. I have allowed you to put some things in a trash
bag and leave. I have called the police, so you are racing against time. If you
are caught, you will have a home in a jail cell, because I will press charges. I
have let you into my life in this book, sure, but I did not let you into my
apartment. So please leave. The police are on their way. I don't like
uncomfortable scenes, and I don't like handcuffs and Tasers.
"You are homeless. You are starting off worse than I did. I hope I can help
you.
"But for those of you who answered, "No," then, be happy. Although you
missed out on the "hitting rock bottom" experience that I just created for
some of your fellow Readers, you should be happy because either you don't
have roaches, or they're dead. Or you don't have dead violets (that is my
interpretation of "violets are through" -- your own interpretation of that line
might differ). Or you don't have a one-bedroom; or, if you do, it's not dank.
Maybe it's uncomfortably dry? If so, get a humidifier. Your nasal passages
are taking an unnecessary beating.
"I am using the Merriam-Webster definition of "dank" as "unpleasantly
moist or wet." But the Urban Dictionary
describes "dank"
as slang for "sticky, hairy, stinky, and highly potent marijuana."
"That raises an interesting point: Did I create A New Financial Me by selling
marijuana? The highly sticky and potent kind? Perhaps, too, the poet (let's
not assume anymore that the "I" of the poem is I) is reflecting this by using
"sprouts" as a verb, a word that is commonly associated with plants. Is Brian
J. Foley advocating that his Readers become pot dealers? No, I am not. But
given that marijuana possession of less than one ounce has been
decriminalized in Massachusetts, where I am writing this book, mostly in the
nude, that is a fair assumption. (I am done writing it now, of course, but I am
probably still nude.)
"If you have some dank, please send it my way (less than an ounce). It is not
a criminal act. You may incur civil liability (a mere fine, and the police
might take away your dank, worth the risk of getting stoned senseless), but
you are not a criminal if you smoke dank. You are a pothead.
I think it would be hard to be a pot dealer if you can only have less than an
ounce on hand. You would have to keep running back to other dealers who
have less than an ounce to get your less than an ounce to sell to people. That
starts sounding like a pain. So if you want to be efficient, don't do that.
Instead, just break the law, and don't get caught.
"Can you make lots of Money selling drugs? My best source on this is the
1983 movie, Scarface, starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana. That Cuban
refugee definitely created A New Financial [Him] when he came to the
United States and became a drug dealer.
"Remember, my journey is not your journey. Nor is Tony Montana's journey
your journey. So it is irrelevant what "dank" means in the poem. We are
talking about your journey here.
"I have kicked you out of my apartment, just for being there, and out of your
apartment, possibly for smoking pot. That is one way to interpret today's
first step."
Did you get all that?
If you've really applied yourself and followed all the detours and crooked
roads to princely wealth set forth in this tome, you're probably hungry and
homeless, and precisely in the right frame of mind to consider the plight of
the world's billionaires.
Guru Foley starts off Day 37 (A "Special Bonus" For The Children) with a
discussion of "a Forbes article about what sort of parents rear financially
successful children."
"Forbes.com ran a story that talked about what the world's billionaires have
in common. We already know one thing: they have a lot of Money.
"But this Special Bonus! is for the children who may be reading A New
Financial You in 28 Days! A 37-Day Plan. If you are a child and reading
this, you are precocious. You are impatient, too impatient to wait for my
forthcoming A New Financial You in 28 Days! -- For the Children.
"Well, the early bird gets the worm. But who wants a worm? You want
Money.
"The Forbes.com story, "A Recipe for Riches," by Duncan Greenberg
among billionaires. One had to do with dropping out of college (good), and
another had to do with going to a top business school (Harvard, Penn,
Columbia) to receive an M.B.A. (good). That means, "Master of Business
Administration." I am not sure how you can get an M.B.A. without going to
college. Were the billionaires able to buy their degrees directly and avoid
college? Were the degrees honorary? These billionaires are, after all,
billionaires.
"But I decided to write this Special Report! (# 4, to be exact) "for the
children," because an important factor in whether a person becomes a
billionaire is that his parents have "math-related" careers. Here's what the
article says:
"First, a significant percentage of them [billionaires] had parents with
a high aptitude for math. The ability to crunch numbers is crucial to
becoming a billionaire, and mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some
of the most common professions among the parents of Forbes 400
members (for whom we could find the information) were engineer,
accountant and small-business owner.
"So, I have advice to you -- advice that Forbes.com seemed unwilling or too
ignorant to give you, the children: Make sure your parents have "math-
related" careers. If your parents are unemployed, encourage them to go back
to school to learn one of these math careers. If any parent refuses, or simply
lacks the aptitude, you know what you have to do: Put yourself into foster
care with parents who have math careers.
"The following Web site will show you some of the forms that you will
need, legally, to get yourself into foster care. These forms are for the state of
California, but they are a start. Odds are, you are in California, because it's a
pretty big state:
"If your parents become upset, just share with them the link from
Forbes.com. They will understand. If they do not, then they do not "share
your values," and there is no reason for you to be with them. We are living,
after all, in the twenty-first century. We can choose our own destinies. We
can choose our own parents. You should also tell your foster parents to-be
that you plan not to go to college. When they realize that adopting you will
be "cost-free," and that you will be a thankful billionaire, their math minds, I
am sure, will quickly calculate that this is a good bet. This is better than
"humanities" parents, who will sit and wring their hands over vague things
such as love, parental ties, their own "experience" in raising you, and the
like.
"Let me know how it turns out. Of course, purchase a copy of A New
Financial You in 28 Days! -- For the Children when it is published. If you
contact me and let me know that you took my advice and moved into foster
care, I will give you a ten percent discount. Use code # 2498KJW."
Anybody rather have the worm?
A Kindle E-Book. 2011, Gegensatz Press, North Syracuse, New York.
$7.98. http://www.gegensatzpress.com/foley-28-days.html.
If you happen to be one of those hopeful people who believe that the next
"how-to" book you buy will be your silver bullet, do not read this column.
You will not only be disappointed. It will cost you. And you could end up
broke and homeless.
I'm not clear on whether these were Brian Foley's goals when he wrote his
latest (actually his first) book, "A New Financial You in 28 Days – a 37-day
plan." I should have known that this was the most un-Kosher self-help book
ever conceived when I read its "Lifetime Guarantee," to wit:
If at the end of the life of the purchaser of A New Financial You in
28 Days! A 37-Day Plan! ("purchaser"), purchaser has not
achieved a "new financial you," purchaser is entitled to a full
refund. This guarantee does not apply to purchaser's successors,
heirs, or assigns. This guarantee may be void in the State of
Minnesota and in North Korea.
I should have known that author of Foley's Follies was a lawyer, in fact a
Law Professor. I should also have guessed he was a comedian, a stand-up
comic to be precise.
Only a lawyer would know how to write such a totally unenforceable
Lifetime Guarantee. And only a Stand-Up Comic would know how to con us
into buying this e-book by stringing together the world's funniest non-
sequiturs and laying them end to end around the globe.
It is only rumor, but I hear on pretty good authority that the last guy to
actually get through this modest volume threw himself off a bridge when he
failed to find logic in any single sentence of the book.
The note he left behind, written on a bunch of shriveled-up Confederate
banknotes, said he now knew how it felt to be James Joyce on steroids. He
noted that Finnegan's Wake was also considered a work of comic fiction
based on free association.
If you're determined to associate yourself with Brian Foley (and I strongly
recommend against it) here is a sampling of some of the comic fiction you
will find in "A New Financial You in 28 Days – a 37-day plan:"
Foley starts off Day One with a poem (a very versatile scribe, he):
A NEW FINANCIAL YOU
The roaches aren't dead.
The violets are through.
From this dank one-bedroom
Sprouts A New Financial You.
"Look around! What you see is Your Financial You. If you want A New
Financial You, you have to do something different. But you can't do that
until you know what you are doing now. Are there roaches in your
apartment? Are they dead? Is your apartment a dank, one-bedroom
apartment? If so, then you are ... probably living in my apartment. Get out!
Now! This is MY apartment!
"Now you are homeless. I have allowed you to put some things in a trash
bag and leave. I have called the police, so you are racing against time. If you
are caught, you will have a home in a jail cell, because I will press charges. I
have let you into my life in this book, sure, but I did not let you into my
apartment. So please leave. The police are on their way. I don't like
uncomfortable scenes, and I don't like handcuffs and Tasers.
"You are homeless. You are starting off worse than I did. I hope I can help
you.
"But for those of you who answered, "No," then, be happy. Although you
missed out on the "hitting rock bottom" experience that I just created for
some of your fellow Readers, you should be happy because either you don't
have roaches, or they're dead. Or you don't have dead violets (that is my
interpretation of "violets are through" -- your own interpretation of that line
might differ). Or you don't have a one-bedroom; or, if you do, it's not dank.
Maybe it's uncomfortably dry? If so, get a humidifier. Your nasal passages
are taking an unnecessary beating.
"I am using the Merriam-Webster definition of "dank" as "unpleasantly
moist or wet." But the Urban Dictionary
as slang for "sticky, hairy, stinky, and highly potent marijuana."
"That raises an interesting point: Did I create A New Financial Me by selling
marijuana? The highly sticky and potent kind? Perhaps, too, the poet (let's
not assume anymore that the "I" of the poem is I) is reflecting this by using
"sprouts" as a verb, a word that is commonly associated with plants. Is Brian
J. Foley advocating that his Readers become pot dealers? No, I am not. But
given that marijuana possession of less than one ounce has been
decriminalized in Massachusetts, where I am writing this book, mostly in the
nude, that is a fair assumption. (I am done writing it now, of course, but I am
probably still nude.)
"If you have some dank, please send it my way (less than an ounce). It is not
a criminal act. You may incur civil liability (a mere fine, and the police
might take away your dank, worth the risk of getting stoned senseless), but
you are not a criminal if you smoke dank. You are a pothead.
I think it would be hard to be a pot dealer if you can only have less than an
ounce on hand. You would have to keep running back to other dealers who
have less than an ounce to get your less than an ounce to sell to people. That
starts sounding like a pain. So if you want to be efficient, don't do that.
Instead, just break the law, and don't get caught.
"Can you make lots of Money selling drugs? My best source on this is the
1983 movie, Scarface, starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana. That Cuban
refugee definitely created A New Financial [Him] when he came to the
United States and became a drug dealer.
"Remember, my journey is not your journey. Nor is Tony Montana's journey
your journey. So it is irrelevant what "dank" means in the poem. We are
talking about your journey here.
"I have kicked you out of my apartment, just for being there, and out of your
apartment, possibly for smoking pot. That is one way to interpret today's
first step."
Did you get all that?
If you've really applied yourself and followed all the detours and crooked
roads to princely wealth set forth in this tome, you're probably hungry and
homeless, and precisely in the right frame of mind to consider the plight of
the world's billionaires.
Guru Foley starts off Day 37 (A "Special Bonus" For The Children) with a
discussion of "a Forbes article about what sort of parents rear financially
successful children."
"Forbes.com ran a story that talked about what the world's billionaires have
in common. We already know one thing: they have a lot of Money.
"But this Special Bonus! is for the children who may be reading A New
Financial You in 28 Days! A 37-Day Plan. If you are a child and reading
this, you are precocious. You are impatient, too impatient to wait for my
forthcoming A New Financial You in 28 Days! -- For the Children.
"Well, the early bird gets the worm. But who wants a worm? You want
Money.
"The Forbes.com story, "A Recipe for Riches," by Duncan Greenberg
among billionaires. One had to do with dropping out of college (good), and
another had to do with going to a top business school (Harvard, Penn,
Columbia) to receive an M.B.A. (good). That means, "Master of Business
Administration." I am not sure how you can get an M.B.A. without going to
college. Were the billionaires able to buy their degrees directly and avoid
college? Were the degrees honorary? These billionaires are, after all,
billionaires.
"But I decided to write this Special Report! (# 4, to be exact) "for the
children," because an important factor in whether a person becomes a
billionaire is that his parents have "math-related" careers. Here's what the
article says:
"First, a significant percentage of them [billionaires] had parents with
a high aptitude for math. The ability to crunch numbers is crucial to
becoming a billionaire, and mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some
of the most common professions among the parents of Forbes 400
members (for whom we could find the information) were engineer,
accountant and small-business owner.
"So, I have advice to you -- advice that Forbes.com seemed unwilling or too
ignorant to give you, the children: Make sure your parents have "math-
related" careers. If your parents are unemployed, encourage them to go back
to school to learn one of these math careers. If any parent refuses, or simply
lacks the aptitude, you know what you have to do: Put yourself into foster
care with parents who have math careers.
"The following Web site will show you some of the forms that you will
need, legally, to get yourself into foster care. These forms are for the state of
California, but they are a start. Odds are, you are in California, because it's a
pretty big state:
"If your parents become upset, just share with them the link from
Forbes.com. They will understand. If they do not, then they do not "share
your values," and there is no reason for you to be with them. We are living,
after all, in the twenty-first century. We can choose our own destinies. We
can choose our own parents. You should also tell your foster parents to-be
that you plan not to go to college. When they realize that adopting you will
be "cost-free," and that you will be a thankful billionaire, their math minds, I
am sure, will quickly calculate that this is a good bet. This is better than
"humanities" parents, who will sit and wring their hands over vague things
such as love, parental ties, their own "experience" in raising you, and the
like.
"Let me know how it turns out. Of course, purchase a copy of A New
Financial You in 28 Days! -- For the Children when it is published. If you
contact me and let me know that you took my advice and moved into foster
care, I will give you a ten percent discount. Use code # 2498KJW."
Anybody rather have the worm?
A Kindle E-Book. 2011, Gegensatz Press, North Syracuse, New York.
$7.98. http://www.gegensatzpress.com/foley-28-days.html.
Friday, August 05, 2011
Can We Please Call a Nut a Nut?
By William Fisher
I must be some kind of masochist because I spend a good deal of my non-writing time watching cable TV. And, with a few notable exceptions, I’m appalled by the relentlessly low journalistic standards I see there every day.
Let me give you an example. Earlier this week, three teens attending a summer camp at Virginia Tech told campus police they saw a man carrying what might be a rifle of some kind. As soon as this information reached CNN, it went on air as, you guessed it, “breaking news.” Breaking news, course, grabs viewers’ attention.
Since Virginia Tech was not long ago the scene of a horrible gun attack that left many dead, CNN was arguably justified in running its bulletin. But throughout the day, the “breaking news” bulletins continued – without so much as a sliver of new information to help viewers understand what had happened. CNN’s “breaking news” was over late in the day only when campus police cancelled the lockdown of the university and called off the search for the illusory gunman. Ditto, MSNBC and Fox News.
But my real beef with cable – and with much of print media and almost all of the blogosphere – concerns far more serious issues. When I was in journalism school, I was taught about “Objectivity.” And when I went to work for the AP, I was handed their little booklet on the same subject.
Objectivity in those days meant that if I was covering a speech by a notorious demagogue, I’d have to find a external source to quote so my readers would know that the speaker was a notorious demagogue. I couldn’t do it myself – even though I knew the truth -- because “that would make me part of the story.”
And if an external source wasn’t immediately available, the quote might go unanswered for at least the first edition. It was this very sacred tenet of journalism that produced story after story in which the lead told of charges by Senator Joe McCarthy and an alternative view – if there was one at all – was written way down into the text.
And so it is on TV as well. Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said on TV and in print that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue. This is a claim often made by Republican politicians, but it is denied by every responsible Republican economist I know and is clearly out of line with all known facts on the subject. The empirical evidence shows the Bush tax cuts produced no new revenue. Yet McConnell not only stuck to his statement – unchallenged – but also asserted that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”
Let’s hope that when Mitt Romney, seen today as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, endorses the McConnell view – and he will -- there’ll be someone in the studio to challenge his “facts.”
We saw the same kind of “objectivity” during the “bargaining” over increasing the debt limit. Over and over, Republican spokespersons would try to sell us the insane idea that if we just shrank everybody’s budget to the vanishing point, obliterating the jobs of police, firefighters, EMTs, teachers, et cetera, we could balance the budget and create jobs. Just what jobs would thus be created remains unclear.
And since the Republicans were the first to speak, their claims occupied the leads in most of the stories covering the debt ceiling circus. Democratic politicians hit back, to be sure, but the public tends to remember the first thing it hears.
And so it was with the “economic plan” put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, labeled by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as the “innovative thinker du jour.”
Krugman noted that Ryan “has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his ‘Roadmap for America’s Future’, a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes.” News media coverage, he said, “has been overwhelmingly favorable.”
He cited a glowing profile of Ryan that The Washington Post put on its front page, “portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience.”
Ryan, Krugman continued, is “often described with phrases like ‘intellectually audacious.’ But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.”
Krugman continued: “Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits ‘in apocalyptic terms’. And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: ‘The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.’ But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.”
But most Americans never heard Krugman or any other journalist whose ideas even got close to Krugmans. The TV “debates” over his plan were dumbed down to pre-K levels – if they could be reduced to a 10-second sound bite. Ryan was incessantly hailed as “courageous” – even by Democrats who grudgingly acknowledged that “it took guts” to propose such a radical plan. That’s the same radical plan, by the way, that would turn Medicare into a voucher program; every senior would get a voucher to go out and buy private insurance, and if the insurance premium was higher than the value of the voucher, well, tough.
Another of the media’s pratfalls came in its non-response to the Republicans’ reluctance to create any new revenue by slightly increasing the taxes of the country’s wealthiest. The GOP talking points included the falsehood that these taxpayers were the nation’s “job creators.” (in other iterations, the job-creators were America’s small businesses). The “small businesses” included among the GOP’s wealthiest 400, by the way, include some of the country’s largest privately owned farms, which not only create very few jobs but in fact receive massive subsidies from the Department of Agriculture.
How utterly absurd is the proposition that the wealthiest among us create jobs for the poorest among us! If this were demonstrably true, based on experiential data, the country would have created millions of jobs during the George W. Bush presidency. What we know is that not a single job – not one – was created during the eight years of George Bush, despite tax cuts for the rich.
The Republicans are quite correct in their conviction that the country needs to reduce its deficit. But to reduce the deficit at a time when the economy cries out for stimulus, to reduce the deficit by cutting programs – and the millions of jobs that do with them – is the height of both historical ignorance and a brand of hubris not seen since that guy said, “bring ‘em on.”
When politicos lie or bend the truth, we tend to forgive them – most voters think most politicians lie all the time. But where is the check and balance? It used to be our newspapers. But today we have a shrinking number of newspapers we can rely on to at least try to tell us the truth. We have a TV medium that is money-centered, uncreative, and dismissive of any scintilla of common sense among their viewers. And we have a blogosphere wildly out of control with partisanship.
At least with most of the blogosphere, the biases are obvious and the reader always knows where he/she stands. That’s the way it was in the early days of journalism in America. So maybe those of us who try to stay informed today should simply read “Firedog Lake” followed by “Red State.”
That would certainly simplify our lives.
I must be some kind of masochist because I spend a good deal of my non-writing time watching cable TV. And, with a few notable exceptions, I’m appalled by the relentlessly low journalistic standards I see there every day.
Let me give you an example. Earlier this week, three teens attending a summer camp at Virginia Tech told campus police they saw a man carrying what might be a rifle of some kind. As soon as this information reached CNN, it went on air as, you guessed it, “breaking news.” Breaking news, course, grabs viewers’ attention.
Since Virginia Tech was not long ago the scene of a horrible gun attack that left many dead, CNN was arguably justified in running its bulletin. But throughout the day, the “breaking news” bulletins continued – without so much as a sliver of new information to help viewers understand what had happened. CNN’s “breaking news” was over late in the day only when campus police cancelled the lockdown of the university and called off the search for the illusory gunman. Ditto, MSNBC and Fox News.
But my real beef with cable – and with much of print media and almost all of the blogosphere – concerns far more serious issues. When I was in journalism school, I was taught about “Objectivity.” And when I went to work for the AP, I was handed their little booklet on the same subject.
Objectivity in those days meant that if I was covering a speech by a notorious demagogue, I’d have to find a external source to quote so my readers would know that the speaker was a notorious demagogue. I couldn’t do it myself – even though I knew the truth -- because “that would make me part of the story.”
And if an external source wasn’t immediately available, the quote might go unanswered for at least the first edition. It was this very sacred tenet of journalism that produced story after story in which the lead told of charges by Senator Joe McCarthy and an alternative view – if there was one at all – was written way down into the text.
And so it is on TV as well. Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said on TV and in print that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue. This is a claim often made by Republican politicians, but it is denied by every responsible Republican economist I know and is clearly out of line with all known facts on the subject. The empirical evidence shows the Bush tax cuts produced no new revenue. Yet McConnell not only stuck to his statement – unchallenged – but also asserted that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”
Let’s hope that when Mitt Romney, seen today as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, endorses the McConnell view – and he will -- there’ll be someone in the studio to challenge his “facts.”
We saw the same kind of “objectivity” during the “bargaining” over increasing the debt limit. Over and over, Republican spokespersons would try to sell us the insane idea that if we just shrank everybody’s budget to the vanishing point, obliterating the jobs of police, firefighters, EMTs, teachers, et cetera, we could balance the budget and create jobs. Just what jobs would thus be created remains unclear.
And since the Republicans were the first to speak, their claims occupied the leads in most of the stories covering the debt ceiling circus. Democratic politicians hit back, to be sure, but the public tends to remember the first thing it hears.
And so it was with the “economic plan” put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, labeled by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as the “innovative thinker du jour.”
Krugman noted that Ryan “has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his ‘Roadmap for America’s Future’, a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes.” News media coverage, he said, “has been overwhelmingly favorable.”
He cited a glowing profile of Ryan that The Washington Post put on its front page, “portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience.”
Ryan, Krugman continued, is “often described with phrases like ‘intellectually audacious.’ But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.”
Krugman continued: “Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits ‘in apocalyptic terms’. And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: ‘The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.’ But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.”
But most Americans never heard Krugman or any other journalist whose ideas even got close to Krugmans. The TV “debates” over his plan were dumbed down to pre-K levels – if they could be reduced to a 10-second sound bite. Ryan was incessantly hailed as “courageous” – even by Democrats who grudgingly acknowledged that “it took guts” to propose such a radical plan. That’s the same radical plan, by the way, that would turn Medicare into a voucher program; every senior would get a voucher to go out and buy private insurance, and if the insurance premium was higher than the value of the voucher, well, tough.
Another of the media’s pratfalls came in its non-response to the Republicans’ reluctance to create any new revenue by slightly increasing the taxes of the country’s wealthiest. The GOP talking points included the falsehood that these taxpayers were the nation’s “job creators.” (in other iterations, the job-creators were America’s small businesses). The “small businesses” included among the GOP’s wealthiest 400, by the way, include some of the country’s largest privately owned farms, which not only create very few jobs but in fact receive massive subsidies from the Department of Agriculture.
How utterly absurd is the proposition that the wealthiest among us create jobs for the poorest among us! If this were demonstrably true, based on experiential data, the country would have created millions of jobs during the George W. Bush presidency. What we know is that not a single job – not one – was created during the eight years of George Bush, despite tax cuts for the rich.
The Republicans are quite correct in their conviction that the country needs to reduce its deficit. But to reduce the deficit at a time when the economy cries out for stimulus, to reduce the deficit by cutting programs – and the millions of jobs that do with them – is the height of both historical ignorance and a brand of hubris not seen since that guy said, “bring ‘em on.”
When politicos lie or bend the truth, we tend to forgive them – most voters think most politicians lie all the time. But where is the check and balance? It used to be our newspapers. But today we have a shrinking number of newspapers we can rely on to at least try to tell us the truth. We have a TV medium that is money-centered, uncreative, and dismissive of any scintilla of common sense among their viewers. And we have a blogosphere wildly out of control with partisanship.
At least with most of the blogosphere, the biases are obvious and the reader always knows where he/she stands. That’s the way it was in the early days of journalism in America. So maybe those of us who try to stay informed today should simply read “Firedog Lake” followed by “Red State.”
That would certainly simplify our lives.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Dear Kate: Response to a Reader’s Thoughts
By William Fisher
Last week, a reader named Kate wrote an angry but well-informed response to a column of mine I called ‘Egypt, Minister of What?’ While I detailed many of the shortcomings of the revolution, my sense was and is that most of these failings are failings not of those who put their lives on the line in Tahrir Square to demand change, but rather the military men who took charge of governing Egypt until it had a legally elected Parliament and Prime Minister.
Kate seemed to agree. She said: “There has been no democratic reform or justice brought in by the Military Council for the Egyptian People. All these on-going state-corrupted media claims of Mubarak and ministers of the ex-regime being sentenced by the military Supreme Council are all false.”
Under ordinary circumstances, this kind of statement would not surprise me; it’s happened in Egypt and elsewhere before; an autocratic despot convicted of plundering his country, who gets convicted, and the next thing we know he turns up in a place with no extradition treaties.
But, Kate, shouldn’t the appearance of Mr. Mubarak, and his sons, and his cronies, in a cage in a court in police academy that used to bear his name – shouldn’t the reality of those optics tell you this is no ordinary proceding?
Kate, you go on to say that “The chaos in Egypt is due to the release of criminals from prisons all over the country, by Mubarak’s regime. Does the world know that there are thousands of criminals on the rampage throughout the county??? It’s not the US or Israel’s fault. Corruption and religious extremism by the regime is the main cause. Lawlessness is at its peak, since the revolution.”
Kate, I confess, I haven’t look into this issue yet, so will have to defer my response.
You go on to say, “Christian Copts are targeted by armed gangs. Daily, Coptic women and children are abducted, drugged and raped by armed gangs. The victims are sexually exploited and forced to denounce their Christian belief and accept Islam as their new religion… Saudi Arabia is funding the Islamization of Coptic Christians.”
Then you write: “In every attack on Copts, criminals are protected by the authorities and never punished by the law. It’s the Coptic victims that are arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. This is just injustice!!! Churches and Christian businesses and villages continue to be attacked by Salafi extremists. When will this ever stop???”
Kate, I don’t know about the Saudi involvement, but in general you’ll find no nay-sayer here. The history of the Copts in modern Egypt is a history of bigotry, discrimination, and cruelty. I also take your point that too often the perpetrators of crimes against Copts commit these crimes with impunity.
But, at this time, is the government not prosecuting several people for the recent violence against Copts and Coptic property? Maybe that’s a kind of progress.
Kate, here I’m taking the liberty of placing one of your paragraphs out of order. Here it is:
“Egypt will not get better until law and order is restored, by imprisonment of criminals with a new democratic government, supported by the U.N. The world is asleep at the wheel, believing ‘everything is honky dory’ in Egypt, since this year’s revolution. Egypt is drowning, day after day. Sadly, the country is in a mess…Everyone is now suffering in this atmosphere of corruption, inequality and injustice.”
Kate, I certainly understand your frustration. Things moved at a glacial pace when I lived in Cairo, and that was not during a revolution. But the history of revolutions seem to tell us (a) that most of them fail, and (b) that failure often occurs when various revolutionary factions fail to agree and end up competing for power, thus giving the rulers (be they military or civilian) the opportunity to “divide and conquer.”
To avoid that, a lot of patience and a lot of dialogue are required. Revolutionary factions must talk with one another and work really hard to understand the others’ needs and goals.
Then all who seek change must talk to the pro-tem rulers, the Army. And the Army, never known for the ability to listen, must be a quick study. They need to understand what their people want and need. The headless horsemen of Tahrir Square have already demonstrated their ability to topple an obsolete leader.
They’re too busy to have to do it again. There’s a country to grow!
Last week, a reader named Kate wrote an angry but well-informed response to a column of mine I called ‘Egypt, Minister of What?’ While I detailed many of the shortcomings of the revolution, my sense was and is that most of these failings are failings not of those who put their lives on the line in Tahrir Square to demand change, but rather the military men who took charge of governing Egypt until it had a legally elected Parliament and Prime Minister.
Kate seemed to agree. She said: “There has been no democratic reform or justice brought in by the Military Council for the Egyptian People. All these on-going state-corrupted media claims of Mubarak and ministers of the ex-regime being sentenced by the military Supreme Council are all false.”
Under ordinary circumstances, this kind of statement would not surprise me; it’s happened in Egypt and elsewhere before; an autocratic despot convicted of plundering his country, who gets convicted, and the next thing we know he turns up in a place with no extradition treaties.
But, Kate, shouldn’t the appearance of Mr. Mubarak, and his sons, and his cronies, in a cage in a court in police academy that used to bear his name – shouldn’t the reality of those optics tell you this is no ordinary proceding?
Kate, you go on to say that “The chaos in Egypt is due to the release of criminals from prisons all over the country, by Mubarak’s regime. Does the world know that there are thousands of criminals on the rampage throughout the county??? It’s not the US or Israel’s fault. Corruption and religious extremism by the regime is the main cause. Lawlessness is at its peak, since the revolution.”
Kate, I confess, I haven’t look into this issue yet, so will have to defer my response.
You go on to say, “Christian Copts are targeted by armed gangs. Daily, Coptic women and children are abducted, drugged and raped by armed gangs. The victims are sexually exploited and forced to denounce their Christian belief and accept Islam as their new religion… Saudi Arabia is funding the Islamization of Coptic Christians.”
Then you write: “In every attack on Copts, criminals are protected by the authorities and never punished by the law. It’s the Coptic victims that are arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. This is just injustice!!! Churches and Christian businesses and villages continue to be attacked by Salafi extremists. When will this ever stop???”
Kate, I don’t know about the Saudi involvement, but in general you’ll find no nay-sayer here. The history of the Copts in modern Egypt is a history of bigotry, discrimination, and cruelty. I also take your point that too often the perpetrators of crimes against Copts commit these crimes with impunity.
But, at this time, is the government not prosecuting several people for the recent violence against Copts and Coptic property? Maybe that’s a kind of progress.
Kate, here I’m taking the liberty of placing one of your paragraphs out of order. Here it is:
“Egypt will not get better until law and order is restored, by imprisonment of criminals with a new democratic government, supported by the U.N. The world is asleep at the wheel, believing ‘everything is honky dory’ in Egypt, since this year’s revolution. Egypt is drowning, day after day. Sadly, the country is in a mess…Everyone is now suffering in this atmosphere of corruption, inequality and injustice.”
Kate, I certainly understand your frustration. Things moved at a glacial pace when I lived in Cairo, and that was not during a revolution. But the history of revolutions seem to tell us (a) that most of them fail, and (b) that failure often occurs when various revolutionary factions fail to agree and end up competing for power, thus giving the rulers (be they military or civilian) the opportunity to “divide and conquer.”
To avoid that, a lot of patience and a lot of dialogue are required. Revolutionary factions must talk with one another and work really hard to understand the others’ needs and goals.
Then all who seek change must talk to the pro-tem rulers, the Army. And the Army, never known for the ability to listen, must be a quick study. They need to understand what their people want and need. The headless horsemen of Tahrir Square have already demonstrated their ability to topple an obsolete leader.
They’re too busy to have to do it again. There’s a country to grow!
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Afghanistan: Your Tax Dollars at Work
By William Fisher
Wherever there’s war, there’s waste. And theft. And corruption.
Think back to 2003-2004, when the Americans were still trying to track the US tax dollars that had “gone missing” in the Iraq War. In one Congressional hearing alone, lawmakers heard testimony that billions of Iraqi dollars – held in trust by the U.S. Government – still could not be accounted for.
Both Republicans and Democrats at that hearing appeared taken aback by the volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 to June 2004.
Rep. Christopher Shays, then the Connecticut Republican chairman of the committee, criticized Pentagon witnesses for their handling of the money.
"It's very clear that … we didn't have systems in place to account" for the
funds, he said.
Jack Behrman, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina Business School, told this correspondent, "The misuse, abuse, and misdirection of funds to Iraq are a perfect example of the U.S. historical approach to crises abroad and development aid -- throw money at the problem quickly to demonstrate concern and activity. But, the government has apparently never heard or has not heeded the admonition of Aristotle that ‘It is easy to give money away, but it is exceedingly difficult to give it away wisely’.”
A report prepared by California Democratic Congressman Waxman found “an appalling level of incompetence, mismanagement, waste, fraud, and greed.” Waxman’s report cited numerous examples of “wasteful and potentially corrupt spending.”
So why should we be surprised to learn that things are no different in Afghanistan – only perhaps worse. Were we supposed to have learned any lessons from the Iraq fiasco?
Apparently not, because a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is igniting yet more suspicions that U.S. taxpayer money for projects in Afghanistan may have been – and is currently being – diverted to extremists killing dedicated to killing American troops, and that an estimated $10 million a day is being smuggled out of the country by senior government officials.
The newest SIGAR report to Congress charges that the United States still has only "limited visibility" of what happens to billions of dollars, "leaving them vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents."
The Inspector General says that more than $70 billion has been spent on security and development projects since 2002 in Afghanistan, but lack of oversight, foot-dragging by the Afghanistan government and failure to take simple steps like recording cash serial numbers means some of the money is hard to track.
One problem, the IG report says, is the use of hawalas -- traditional and informal financial organizations -- instead of banks to transfer funds. Some hawalas are registered with the government, but others are not and refuse to divulge details of their business.
The report cites an example of how a U.S. contractor tried to transfer
$2.8 million inside Afghanistan that never arrived. "Despite investigations by National Solidarity Program personnel and interventions on the part of the Afghan Attorney General's office, this hawala continues to retain the majority of these funds and refuses to deliver them to the intended communities," the report says.
Another problem is that large amounts of money -- as much as $10 million a day -- are smuggled out of the country. The report says that despite controls at Kabul airport, government officials and other powerful people in Afghanistan can avoid currency checks when they leave.
"Passengers designated by the Afghan government as VIPs bypass the main security and customs screenings used by all other passengers and instead use a separate facility to enter the secured area of the airport," the report says.
"While VIPs are required to declare their currency, Afghan officials reportedly have no plans to scan their cash through electronic currency counters." U.S. officials were denied access to that part of the airport to see how VIP passengers were screened.
SIGAR found that U.S. agencies have limited visibility over U.S. cash that enters the Afghan economy -- leaving it vulnerable to fraud and diversion to the insurgency. SIGAR also found that poor cooperation by the Afghan government has impeded U.S. efforts to help develop the Afghan financial sector.
"The United States has poured billions of aid dollars into a country plagued by corruption, insurgency and the narcotics trade. It is essential that we use all available tools to ensure that U.S. dollars are protected from fraud and diversion to the insurgency. We must also ensure that the Afghan government is a full partner in efforts to set a fledgling financial sector on sound footing," said Herbert Richardson, acting Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
"SIGAR auditors found that U.S. agencies have not done all they can to safeguard U.S. funds, and the Afghan government has not provided the cooperation needed to build a strong, secure financial system. SIGAR's recommendations, if implemented, would address these shortcomings and strengthen efforts to protect American taxpayers," the report says.
The agency recommended that the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan "improve interagency coordination on financial sector development programs" and also recommended that the secretaries of State and Defense "strengthen oversight over the flow of U.S. funds through the Afghan economy," according to the report.
Since 2002, Congress has appropriated more than $70 billion to implement security and development assistance projects in Afghanistan, with some of those funds converted into cash that flows through the Afghan economy.
The United States is implementing programs to increase the capacity of Afghanistan's central bank to regulate the nation's 17 commercial banks and to strengthen U.S. and Afghan law-enforcement monitoring of controls over the flows of U.S. aid through the Afghan economy.
SIGAR's audit evaluates U.S. efforts to improve the capacity of the Afghan government to regulate the financial sector and assesses controls that U.S. agencies use to track U.S. funds as they flow through the Afghan economy.
The New York Times reports that agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official, The Times reported, kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office.
The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four
Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints
of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the
transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional
authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and
American money.
Key findings:
Although U.S. agencies have taken steps to strengthen their oversight of U.S. funds, the United States still has limited visibility over how these funds flow through the Afghan economy, leaving them vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents. Among the vulnerabilities identified by SIGAR auditors:
· U.S. agencies do not record the serial numbers of cash disbursed to contractors and other recipients of U.S. funds;
· Afghan commercial banks do not record the serial numbers of Electronic Funds Transfer payments by U.S. agencies to contractors and other recipients when they are converted to cash;
· U.S. contracting regulations do not prohibit prime contractors from using unlicensed hawalas to pay subcontractors or require them to use EFT-capable banks to make payments. As a result, the United States is unable to record information n these funds when they enter Afghanistan's economy, and the Afghan and U.S. governments are unable to track these funds as they move from person to person, information that could be important for law enforcement purposes.
· Limited Afghan cooperation has negatively impacted programs to strengthen Afghanistan's financial sector and address money laundering and terrorist financing. For example, the Afghan Attorney General's office has not cooperated fully in prosecuting individuals suspected by the U.S. Treasury Department of having committed financial crimes, limiting the effectiveness of the Financial Transactions and Records Analysis Center of Afghanistan (FinTRACA). Of 21 leads forwarded by FinTRACA to the Afghan government, only four were pursued to prosecution by the Afghan Attorney General's office.
· In addition, Treasury officials report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has barred U.S. government advisors from the Afghan central bank, a key institution that they described as having a "hostile"environment.
· Limited Afghan cooperation has hindered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's efforts to strengthen controls over currency flows at Kabul International Airport. As a result of concerns over lack of controls over the significant flow of currency through the airport, DHS developed the Bulk Cash Flow Action Plan with assistance from Afghan ministries that conduct operations at the airport. DHS's responsibilities under the Bulk Cash Flow Action Plan include supporting Afghan government efforts to strengthen controls over passengers leaving Afghanistan with bulk cash. However, DHS reports that installation of two custom-built bulk currency counters for the airport's customs areas was delayed by seven months because of disagreements over where to place the machines.
· Also, as of SIGAR's April 2011 visit to the airport, Afghan customs officials were using the machines to count declared cash - but not to record serial numbers or report financial data to FinTRACA. Other impediments to DHS efforts include the Afghan government's practice of allowing VIPs to bypass the main security and customs screenings used by all other passengers; these VIPs are required to declare their currency, but Afghan officials reportedly have no plans to scan this cash through currency counters. Additionally, DHS officials are barred from the facility that VIPs currently use.
Yes, you read that correctly. US officials are barred from that particular room at the back of the Kabul airport so that Afghan VIPS will suffer no embarrassments or anxieties – dare I say pangs of conscience? – as they secret your tax dollars in their luggage or on their person, knowing that as government officials there will be no search at their destination either.
War usually means we have to accept some of this despicable behavior. It seems to go with the territory. But given that these funds are intended to improve the lot of the Afghan people, not US troops, is it not time to say ‘enough is enough?’
The US lopped off a good chunk of American aid to Pakistan because the Pakistanis were not with the program. Failing all past efforts to find an honest partner to work with in Afghanistan, hasn’t the time come to do the same?
Wherever there’s war, there’s waste. And theft. And corruption.
Think back to 2003-2004, when the Americans were still trying to track the US tax dollars that had “gone missing” in the Iraq War. In one Congressional hearing alone, lawmakers heard testimony that billions of Iraqi dollars – held in trust by the U.S. Government – still could not be accounted for.
Both Republicans and Democrats at that hearing appeared taken aback by the volume of cash sent to Iraq: nearly $12 billion over the course of the U.S. occupation from March 2003 to June 2004.
Rep. Christopher Shays, then the Connecticut Republican chairman of the committee, criticized Pentagon witnesses for their handling of the money.
"It's very clear that … we didn't have systems in place to account" for the
funds, he said.
Jack Behrman, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina Business School, told this correspondent, "The misuse, abuse, and misdirection of funds to Iraq are a perfect example of the U.S. historical approach to crises abroad and development aid -- throw money at the problem quickly to demonstrate concern and activity. But, the government has apparently never heard or has not heeded the admonition of Aristotle that ‘It is easy to give money away, but it is exceedingly difficult to give it away wisely’.”
A report prepared by California Democratic Congressman Waxman found “an appalling level of incompetence, mismanagement, waste, fraud, and greed.” Waxman’s report cited numerous examples of “wasteful and potentially corrupt spending.”
So why should we be surprised to learn that things are no different in Afghanistan – only perhaps worse. Were we supposed to have learned any lessons from the Iraq fiasco?
Apparently not, because a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is igniting yet more suspicions that U.S. taxpayer money for projects in Afghanistan may have been – and is currently being – diverted to extremists killing dedicated to killing American troops, and that an estimated $10 million a day is being smuggled out of the country by senior government officials.
The newest SIGAR report to Congress charges that the United States still has only "limited visibility" of what happens to billions of dollars, "leaving them vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents."
The Inspector General says that more than $70 billion has been spent on security and development projects since 2002 in Afghanistan, but lack of oversight, foot-dragging by the Afghanistan government and failure to take simple steps like recording cash serial numbers means some of the money is hard to track.
One problem, the IG report says, is the use of hawalas -- traditional and informal financial organizations -- instead of banks to transfer funds. Some hawalas are registered with the government, but others are not and refuse to divulge details of their business.
The report cites an example of how a U.S. contractor tried to transfer
$2.8 million inside Afghanistan that never arrived. "Despite investigations by National Solidarity Program personnel and interventions on the part of the Afghan Attorney General's office, this hawala continues to retain the majority of these funds and refuses to deliver them to the intended communities," the report says.
Another problem is that large amounts of money -- as much as $10 million a day -- are smuggled out of the country. The report says that despite controls at Kabul airport, government officials and other powerful people in Afghanistan can avoid currency checks when they leave.
"Passengers designated by the Afghan government as VIPs bypass the main security and customs screenings used by all other passengers and instead use a separate facility to enter the secured area of the airport," the report says.
"While VIPs are required to declare their currency, Afghan officials reportedly have no plans to scan their cash through electronic currency counters." U.S. officials were denied access to that part of the airport to see how VIP passengers were screened.
SIGAR found that U.S. agencies have limited visibility over U.S. cash that enters the Afghan economy -- leaving it vulnerable to fraud and diversion to the insurgency. SIGAR also found that poor cooperation by the Afghan government has impeded U.S. efforts to help develop the Afghan financial sector.
"The United States has poured billions of aid dollars into a country plagued by corruption, insurgency and the narcotics trade. It is essential that we use all available tools to ensure that U.S. dollars are protected from fraud and diversion to the insurgency. We must also ensure that the Afghan government is a full partner in efforts to set a fledgling financial sector on sound footing," said Herbert Richardson, acting Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
"SIGAR auditors found that U.S. agencies have not done all they can to safeguard U.S. funds, and the Afghan government has not provided the cooperation needed to build a strong, secure financial system. SIGAR's recommendations, if implemented, would address these shortcomings and strengthen efforts to protect American taxpayers," the report says.
The agency recommended that the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan "improve interagency coordination on financial sector development programs" and also recommended that the secretaries of State and Defense "strengthen oversight over the flow of U.S. funds through the Afghan economy," according to the report.
Since 2002, Congress has appropriated more than $70 billion to implement security and development assistance projects in Afghanistan, with some of those funds converted into cash that flows through the Afghan economy.
The United States is implementing programs to increase the capacity of Afghanistan's central bank to regulate the nation's 17 commercial banks and to strengthen U.S. and Afghan law-enforcement monitoring of controls over the flows of U.S. aid through the Afghan economy.
SIGAR's audit evaluates U.S. efforts to improve the capacity of the Afghan government to regulate the financial sector and assesses controls that U.S. agencies use to track U.S. funds as they flow through the Afghan economy.
The New York Times reports that agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official, The Times reported, kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office.
The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four
Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints
of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the
transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional
authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and
American money.
Key findings:
Although U.S. agencies have taken steps to strengthen their oversight of U.S. funds, the United States still has limited visibility over how these funds flow through the Afghan economy, leaving them vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents. Among the vulnerabilities identified by SIGAR auditors:
· U.S. agencies do not record the serial numbers of cash disbursed to contractors and other recipients of U.S. funds;
· Afghan commercial banks do not record the serial numbers of Electronic Funds Transfer payments by U.S. agencies to contractors and other recipients when they are converted to cash;
· U.S. contracting regulations do not prohibit prime contractors from using unlicensed hawalas to pay subcontractors or require them to use EFT-capable banks to make payments. As a result, the United States is unable to record information n these funds when they enter Afghanistan's economy, and the Afghan and U.S. governments are unable to track these funds as they move from person to person, information that could be important for law enforcement purposes.
· Limited Afghan cooperation has negatively impacted programs to strengthen Afghanistan's financial sector and address money laundering and terrorist financing. For example, the Afghan Attorney General's office has not cooperated fully in prosecuting individuals suspected by the U.S. Treasury Department of having committed financial crimes, limiting the effectiveness of the Financial Transactions and Records Analysis Center of Afghanistan (FinTRACA). Of 21 leads forwarded by FinTRACA to the Afghan government, only four were pursued to prosecution by the Afghan Attorney General's office.
· In addition, Treasury officials report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has barred U.S. government advisors from the Afghan central bank, a key institution that they described as having a "hostile"environment.
· Limited Afghan cooperation has hindered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's efforts to strengthen controls over currency flows at Kabul International Airport. As a result of concerns over lack of controls over the significant flow of currency through the airport, DHS developed the Bulk Cash Flow Action Plan with assistance from Afghan ministries that conduct operations at the airport. DHS's responsibilities under the Bulk Cash Flow Action Plan include supporting Afghan government efforts to strengthen controls over passengers leaving Afghanistan with bulk cash. However, DHS reports that installation of two custom-built bulk currency counters for the airport's customs areas was delayed by seven months because of disagreements over where to place the machines.
· Also, as of SIGAR's April 2011 visit to the airport, Afghan customs officials were using the machines to count declared cash - but not to record serial numbers or report financial data to FinTRACA. Other impediments to DHS efforts include the Afghan government's practice of allowing VIPs to bypass the main security and customs screenings used by all other passengers; these VIPs are required to declare their currency, but Afghan officials reportedly have no plans to scan this cash through currency counters. Additionally, DHS officials are barred from the facility that VIPs currently use.
Yes, you read that correctly. US officials are barred from that particular room at the back of the Kabul airport so that Afghan VIPS will suffer no embarrassments or anxieties – dare I say pangs of conscience? – as they secret your tax dollars in their luggage or on their person, knowing that as government officials there will be no search at their destination either.
War usually means we have to accept some of this despicable behavior. It seems to go with the territory. But given that these funds are intended to improve the lot of the Afghan people, not US troops, is it not time to say ‘enough is enough?’
The US lopped off a good chunk of American aid to Pakistan because the Pakistanis were not with the program. Failing all past efforts to find an honest partner to work with in Afghanistan, hasn’t the time come to do the same?
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