The Department of Homeland Security {DHS} knew about the Boston bomber’s trip to Russia, despite a misspelled name on his travel documents, the agency’s chief, Janet Napolitano, told a Senate subcommittee a week after
Our increasingly militarized police: Do we
really need all this to go after a 19-year-old?
the atrocity. Redundancies in the system caught the disparity and “there was a ping on the outbound to Customs”, one of the divisions of the DHS, she said.
That puzzled Sen. Lindsay Graham (R, SC), who had been told by the FBI that “that they had no knowledge of [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] leaving or coming back”.
But the FBI is separate — a part of the Justice Department. Both they and CIA had added the older Tsarnaev to two different watch lists in 2011. CIA notified State and DHS. They had been tipped off by Russian intelligence, suspicious about the U.S. transplant from Dagestan even before he went to Russia. But neither CIA nor FBI noticed when Tsarnaev last year went back to the mother country.
where have we heard that before?
What we are hearing is that what one agency knew was not shared with the other and that databases are where information goes to die. Russia had warned the FBI twice, calling the older brother “a follower of radical Islam” who had “changed drastically”, yet the FBI dropped the matter because a law prevents them from indefinite surveillance, they now say. That ping to Customs? That was relayed to the Boston area FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. There is no evidence so far that they took any action.
This account and another by the New York Times reminds us of George Tenant warning the president in the summer of 2011 that “the system is blinking red” and yet the signals were once again missed. Here’s what it was like in the prelude to 9/11, which we offer to compare progress between then and now.
the 9/11 commission revisited
The 2004 commission investigating the 9/11 attacks uncovered numerous instances where vital information that might have warned us of the attacks instead disappeared into dead ends, with notorious failings to “connect the dots”. In fact, a structural fault was found right in the 9/11 Commission’s ranks. One of its panelists, Jamie Gorelick, was the author of rules while at the Justice Department that set up “the wall” through which information must not pass, even within the FBI. Agencies were forbidden to pass criminal investigation discoveries to intelligence agencies and vice versa. The CIA was restricted to international, the FBI to domestic. Gorelick’s rules were viewed as an excessive extension of separations originally established by the Church committee in the 1970s.
Partly as a result, unconnected dots littered the landscape before 9/11. Here’s a sampling:
  |
The 9/11 Commission asked CIA chief George Tenet why CIA had done nothing to track down Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed the south tower of the World Trade Center. Thirty months earlier, German intelligence “gave us a name, Marwan — that’s it — and a phone number. They didn’t give us a first and last name until after 9/11″. |
|
Two known Al Qaeda operatives, found
by a CIA search of their Dubai hotel room in January 2000 to have valid visas to enter the U.S., were not put on a watch
list to block their entry. Not until May 2001 did a CIA agent reopen
their case and find that one had come to Los Angeles. An FBI agent was
asked to review the material, but “in
her free time”. She began on July 24 and learned from the INS that the two
might be in country. She informed the FBI’s counter-terror center in New
York but labeled her e-mail “routine”, which gave them 30 days to respond.
One operative was listed in the San Diego phonebook. Both were 9/11 hijackers. |
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An FBI field agent in Phoenix reported to Washington in July 2001 that he had discovered young foreigners who might be affiliated with Islamic terrorist groups were seeking flight training. He urged a nationwide investigation of flight schools. There was no follow-up. |
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In Minneapolis, a flight school alerted the FBI in August 2001 that a student named Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, wanted to learn only how to steer a plane, not how to take off or land. Agents arrested him on immigration charges, then urged superiors in Washington to obtain a warrant to search his belongings, arguing that he appeared to be an Islamic extremist. The warrant was refused. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. |
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Richard Clarke, the top White House counter-terrorism adviser, says he was never informed of the two Al Qaeda operatives known to be in the U.S. |
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FBI director Robert Mueller and his senior deputies say they weren’t informed until after 9/11 about Phoenix and Minneapolis. |
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The FBI’s arrest of Moussaoui on Aug. 17 was relayed by the FBI-CIA counter-terror center to the highest levels of the CIA, including George Tenet, the Commission reported, but “the news had no evident effect of warning”. Had Moussaoui’s name been run through British intelligence files, the CIA would have discovered he had undergone training with Al Qaeda. |
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The only pre-9/11 meeting on counter-terrorism with the heads of State, Defense, the FBI and the CIA attending was not held until Sept. 4, 2001. Moussaoui wasn’t discussed |
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Neither the FBI nor Justice were informed of the CIA’s now famous Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief (PDB). |
The disappearance of information down rabbit holes is what was supposed to have been fixed, especially with the creation of the enormous Department of Homeland Security, which placed more than a dozen organizations under one roof, from the Coast Guard to FEMA. But not FBI and not CIA nor the archipelago of intelligence agencies and private companies that were born in the aftermath of 9/11 and which constitute the new, secret American security state — secret until exposed in Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s monumental investigation for the Washington Post. So, instead of consolidation, there has been staggering proliferation, spending and overlap.
And we’re not done. There is yet another layer, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a regional network with each chapter comprised of representatives from the FBI and those same components of Homeland Security we just cited. There are a hundred JTTFs and they come together at the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (NJTTF), headquartered in Washington, DC, and stocked with representatives from no less than 35 federal agencies. There has been no mention yet of whether the Boston unit was at all mindful of the Tsarnaev brothers, which leads one to wonder what use are all the regionals. Are they vigilant or have all the multiple layers simply led to unwieldy bureaucratic bloat and a return to the apparent rule of nature that separate fiefdoms tend to keep information to themselves, to the nation’s detriment, such as we may have seen in Boston.
Apr 26 2013 | Posted in
Defense |
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After the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq this March and the “Mission Accomplished” moment of May, 2003, that just passed, history is slowly being rewritten to soften the image of George W. Bush, as was apparent in the dedication ceremonies for the Bush Library in Dallas in late April. 
“He kept us safe” is what the former president wants us to remember, to earn credit where credit is due for constructing the vast security apparatus that prevented any further attacks on U.S. soil for almost a dozen years until Boston.
The Iraq invasion is another matter, and it is fair on the 10th anniversary of its March 19, 2003 commencement, followed only six weeks later on May 1 by the heralding of “Mission Accomplished”, to assess the results of that disastrous war. Many in the media have done so. But instead, let’s go back to how it began and recount just how we managed to blunder into so costly a mistake. It’s an extraordinary story: the deceptions the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration spun that many would call treasonous to lure the American public into endorsing an unnecessary war. We shouldn’t allow that memory to dim as the nation faces new threats and considers taking new military actions in Syria and Iran.
the past as prelude
Anyone who knew the recent history of Iraq — the arbitrary boundaries drawn to make a country of hostile ethnic and religious groups when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after World War I — could have foreseen the insurgency that would break out between the Sunni, the Shi’a and the Kurds, once Saddam Hussein’s oppressive lid was lifted from the cauldron of sectarian hatred.
Actually, one didn’t even need that history. Modern day examples had filled our headlines a few years before. The break-up of the Soviet Union had led to two wars of independence by Chechnya against Russia. The break-up of Yugoslavia on Tito’s death ignited wars among the mix of Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, and Albanians — between Christians and Muslims — that gave us the euphemism “ethnic cleansing”.
But Bush had come from the insularity of Texas. He he had been given the same eastern education as his dad’s — Andover and then Yale , where he had majored in history — yet he exhibited little knowledge of foreign policy, and when he began campaigning for the presidency, he was quickly lampooned for getting names and geography wrong.
Thus susceptible, he came under the ambit of neoconservatives, who held that hatred for the West and the U.S. stemmed from the resentment of living under repressive societies that could be fixed with democracy and the freedom it brings. Bush’s oft-said “They hate our freedom” is an outcropping of that doctrine. Such accomplishments could define his presidency.
The neocons had fastened on Iraq in particular, urging intervention to Clinton beyond his policy of containment from the air. Clinton had imposed a no-fly zone and had launched a four-day punitive cruise missile bombing campaign for Hussein’s refusal to comply with United Nations resolutions and weapons inspectors.
But why Iraq, with so many repressive Arab regimes to choose from — Syria, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia? Hussein had threatened Israel — he had lobbed Scud missiles into the country during 1991’s Desert Storm — and that led to accusations that the neocons’ secret agenda was to use American troops to eliminate a Israel’s problem (the top neocons were Jewish), which they denied. The neocons espoused that the toppling of Saddam would unleash an outbreak of democracy in the region, a domino theory that would unseat one after another Arab despot.
”It was always going to be Iraq”
And so it was that Richard Clarke, Bush’s counter-terrorism advisor, recounted that on the night after the 9/11 attacks, the President took Clarke and others aside to say, “I want you to find whether Iraq did this”. When Clarke protested that repeated analysis found no Iraqi link to terrorism, Bush insisted: “Iraq, Saddam, find out if there is a connection.” In his book, “Against All Enemies”, Clarke wrote that, immediately after the attacks, he attended a meeting about what he thought would be the Al Qaeda havens in Afghanistan.
“Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized…that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.”
Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir corroborates. Just fifteen days after 9/11, he says he was called to the Oval Office where Bush ordered up a review and revision of war plans — not for Afghanistan, the training ground and launch platform for the New York and Washington attacks, but for Iraq. “Two weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history the president insisted on new military plans for Iraq”, wrote Rumsfeld. The President simply wanted to attack Iraq.
Preemption
American policy had been to retaliate only when provoked, but Bush had made speeches in his first couple of years as president signaling that, going beyond his immediate response to 9/11 (“we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor 
them”), he would adopt an interventionist policy and use military force even if not provoked. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long”, he said at West Point in June of 2002. “And our security will require all Americans … to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives”. It was a policy that became known as the Bush Doctrine.
Then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz was the most prominent neoconservative. It could be said that the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes was actually Wolfowitz’s handiwork; in 1992 he and his deputy, Scooter Libby, had had authored a Defense Planning Guidance that advocated a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to head off any threat to the United States and prevent any other nation from attaining superpower status. Rumsfeld, in a Fox News interview in 2011, said Wolfowitz was the first to bring up Iraq, at the presidential retreat at Camp David after the 9/11 attacks.
War would become Bush’s foreign policy. Biographer Mickey Herskowitz, given unique access to Bush in 1999 (a longtime Texas newspaper man, he had written the authorized biography of Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush) said that the soon-to-be presidential candidate had fastened on a stratagem ascribed to Cheney, when he was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan: “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.” Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches” .
Once the Iraq enterprise was underway, Bush would say, “I’m a war president. I make decisions … with war on my mind”.
There would be much shrinking of the Bush psyche. His father had held back in 1991’s Desert Storm, content that the coalition had destroyed Saddam’s army and crippled his ability for further mischief. Pundits opined that the younger Bush wanted to best “Poppy’ by going to Baghdad. And/or he wanted to avenge Hussein’s attempt to assassinate Bush Sr when he had gone to Kuwait in 1993 to commemorate the victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.
beating the drums of war
David Frum, the Bush speechwriter who coined “axis of evil”, recently wrote,
”You might imagine that an administration preparing for a war of choice would be gripped by self-questioning and hot debate. Yet that discussion never really happened… For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past”.
But the war had to be sold to the American public. So the Bush administration embarked on a campaign, beginning with Cheney stating on August 26, 2002, “Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon”. Weeks later, a National Intelligence Estimate — a pooling of sixteen intelligence agencies — would say it would take as many as five years, unless Baghdad immediately obtained weapons-grade materials. Two weeks later on “Meet the Press” Cheney would say “We do know, with absolute certainty, that [Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon”.
Iraq “is a grave and gathering danger,” Bush told the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002.
A separate Defense Department intelligence unit was set up to “stovepipe” raw intelligence to the top without following the CIA’s practice of vetting. The White House was looking for evidence to use without the usual caveats and qualifications.
There were the aluminum tubes, that our own Oak Ridge National Laboratories said could not be used in centrifuges for enriching uranium and were probably for rockets.
There was Bush stating in Cincinnati the famous sixteen words: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, ignoring forged documents and a report by Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador sent as a fact-finder to Niger, that this was fable.
The administration told us that Saddam had developed mobile biological weapons labs, a notion they advanced despite warnings from both German and British intelligence that the informant, codenamed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_%28informant%29 “Curveball” by the CIA, was a fabricator. No matter. Bush referred to a British government report that Iraq could launch “a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order” is given. “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX — nerve gas — or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally”.
the flim-flam man
The administration was in the thrall of the patently untrustworthy Ahmed Chalabi, who had been promoted by neocon Richard Perle as the “George Washington of Iraq” in the absurd belief that he would be accepted by Iraqis as the nation’s new leader despite living in exile in London since 1956. (In the years to come, he couldn’t even win a seat in Iraq’s parliament.) The Bush administration was unable to see that it was being had — talked into using American lives to attack Iraq so that Chalabi could anoint himself its prime minister. The CIA had always been skeptical; ultimately, even the administration caught on. Chalabi’s offices in Iraq were raided by the police and the U.S. Army. He is reported to have given U.S. state secrets to the Iranians, and was under investigation for counterfeiting and other crimes by Iraq in keeping with his having been convicted and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal years before. Such was the man in whom the administration and the neocons had placed their trust in going to war.
And, of course, the war was also about oil — although that was always denied. David Frum says that in 2002, Chalabi and Cheney “spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia”.
Just talk? Then how to explain why looting of the Iraq Museum, with its millennia of irreplaceable artifacts was allowed, while almost the only public building in Baghdad that was protected was the oil ministry, guarded around the clock by troops, sharpshooters and about fifty tanks, said an Australian source, days after the invasion.
lying for legal cover
The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by a joint session of Congress three days after 9/11 was “To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States”. Iraq had to be linked to terrorism.
So Cheney went on “Meet the Press” three months after 9/11 to announce that “It’s been pretty well confirmed that [Muhammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia [sic] last April”. The FBI agent assigned to analyze the report had already relayed up the chain that the person in the Prague photos bore no resemblance to Atta, the lead terrorist in the World Trade attack, and was furious enough hearing Cheney say it that for the “first time in my life, I actually threw something at the television”.
Just last June, a CIA document surfaced that said Atta “did not travel to the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000,” and “the individual who attempted to enter the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000 … was not the Atta who attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001”. The document had been delivered to the White House situation room the day before Cheney’s “Meet the Press” appearance, but Cheney chose to lie, and he would lie again in a repeat appearance on that program two years later.
Polling in 2003 showed that as much as 69% of Americans believed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. They probably still do.
pretending indecision
Bush insisted that the decision to go to war was made at the last minute, but then in 2005 came the leak of the “Downing Street Memo” — minutes of a meeting nine months before the invasion between U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his intelligence chief upon the latter’s return from Washington. In meetings with Bush administration officials, he reported that “The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”, but nevertheless “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action…But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
Former CIA analysts said that Cheney had made unusual trips to the CIA, where he pressed for that intelligence that could be fixed around the policy.
The Rumsfeld doctrine
Then came the war itself. It was to be invasion lite, as dictated by Rumsfeld, who wanted to try out his new theory of “transformation”, which held that the high-tech weaponry of the day made it possible for smaller, more agile forces to win wars. He chopped away determinedly at
the military’s manpower requests. When Gen. Eric Shinseki said before Congress that the post-war phase in Iraq could require “several hundred thousand troops” to keep civil order, daring to contradict Rumsfeld’s plan that would prove so mistaken and costly of lives, Rumsfeld had him booted from his post as Army Chief of Staff and virtually forced his retirement.
Wolfowitz, a Pentagon armchair expert who had never donned so much as private’s uniform, knew better than a general who had the experience of commanding NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. He took Shinseki to task in a House hearing days after Shinseki’s testimony, calling his estimate “quite outlandish…wildly off the mark. It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself”. A remarkable statement; all military experience indicates the opposite. Battles engage armies. Occupations require keeping order among entire populations.
For Rumsfeld, the Iraq War was to be: in in March, out by August. There was to be no nation-building. The military, under Gen. Tommy Franks, had no plan whatever for the aftermath of the military victory.
On “Meet the Press”, in June of 2005, Rumsfeld said that before the war started, he had “presented the President a list of about 15 things that could go terribly, terribly wrong”. Host Tim Russert asked, “Was a robust insurgency on your list that you gave the President?” Rumsfeld answered, “I don’t remember whether that was on there.” He had even banned anyone in the Pentagon from using the word “insurgency”, in denial of what had become obvious as Iraq caught fire.
best laid plans mislaid
There had actually been elaborate planning. The CIA in May 2002 embarked on a series of war games, including scenarios dealing with postwar civil disorder. But Rumsfeld’s Pentagon reprimanded Defense personnel who had taken part and ordered them to discontinue.
At the State Department under Thomas Warrick, 17 working groups of mostly Iraqi exiles developed throughout 2002 blueprints of the occupation, tackling questions of water, electricity, “Transitional Justice”, “Public Finance”, “Oil and Energy”, “Water, Agriculture and Environment”, etc. It would result in thousands of pages in 13 volumes, plus a summary volume, that became known as the “Future of Iraq Project”. But Rumsfeld’s people were ordered to ignore all of it. There was no way that State would be allowed to run any part of the Iraq program. (When retired general Jay Garner, who was sent to Iraq to reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, heard about Warrick and hired him, he was ordered to fire him).
As the insurgency broke out, the Army then lost control of its mission — removal of Saddam and “regime change” — and began attacking the Iraqi population, especially the 4th Infanty Division under Gen. Ray Odierno, breaking down doors, humiliating Iraqis before their families, turning them into insurgents, indiscriminately sweeping up thousands to ship off to overflowing Abu Ghraib. Odierno would later be made commander in Iraq and now Army Chief of Staff, rewarded for getting it wrong.
But no one topped L. Paul Bremer for ineptitude and its disastrous consequences. Of particular importance to State Department planners was giving the Iraqi army the job of maintaining order. Its headlong flight in the 1991 Gulf War certainly bespoke an army conscripted against its will with no stomach to die for Saddam. It thus represented a force that might well be eager to help build a post-Saddam Iraq.
Yet Bremer began his Iraqi tour as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq with by disbanding the entire Iraqi army. Thus did he simultaneously force the entire security problem onto the minimalist American invading force, and as well create a new army of 400,000 angry, armed and unemployed soldiers open to recruitment for mayhem.
As well, Bremer purged layers of Ba’ath party technocrats that knew how to pull the levers and turn the wheels of the country’s infrastructure. Nothing worked for months: water shortages, electricity blackouts and rationing squandered the goodwill won by toppling Saddam and replaced it with hostility.
the ledger
And thus did we ignite an eight year war that cut short 4,500 Americans lives, wounded over 30,000, many damaged for the remainder of their lives, and cost the country $2.2 trillion, says a recent study by Brown University. (Wolfowitz had estimated $50 to $60 billion, paid for by Iraqi oil.) For Iraq itself, 2 million were displaced and no one knows how many of its people died. Over 190,000, Brown estimates.
Ten years on, with an authoritarian Shi’ite prime minister who practices the politics of revenge, blocking Sunnis from government participation, and aiming for the permanent control of a third term despite protests, the bombs continue to kill dozens almost daily. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion that rid the country of its dictator, car bombs killed 50 and wounded over 200.
There are those who still think it was worth it — those who fought and cannot abide the thought that it amounted to little but harm, and others whose families had not been personally affected. Such as Cheney. In a Showtime film this month he said, “I feel very good about [Iraq]. If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a minute”.
Apr 26 2013 | Posted in
Defense |
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A gang of eight is reportedly making great progress in drafting a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Nothing like a disastrous election to awaken Republicans to the absent Latino vote. And the Senate even passed a budget for the first time in four years. Nothing like a threat from the House that they wouldn’t get paid if they didn’t.
So you’d think the suddenly responsive Congress would long ago have acted on something else the public likes: getting their mail.
The U.S. Postal Service lost $15.9 billion last year. That’s $50 million every day of delivery. It’s on the verge of collapse. Consumers now pay bills online, communicate in e-mail, and chat on phones that are virtually part of their anatomy. That’s caused first class mail to plunge — down 25% since 2006 alone — sinking the USPS deep in debt.
Any CEO of only modest competence would have taken drastic measures long ago to right that sinking ship, but the USPS is no ordinary business. A supposedly independent agency, its vital decisions are in the hands of Congress — which excels at doing little, and in the case of the postal service, does nothing. We first wrote of the dilemma USPS management faces back in August 2011, and again in March of last year, and congressional irresponsibility dates from well before then.
By statute, the Postmaster General, currently Patrick Donahue, can take little structural action. One step he had been advocating was to end Saturday delivery, a move that would save $2 billion a year, he says. Finally, faced with Congress’ continual failure to do its job, he went and did it anyway, announcing in February that beginning in August service would be cut to five days.
Congress’s reaction? They tacked onto funding legislation an edict that forbids the service from ending Saturday service. Its members were full of indignation at the gall of the Postal Service presuming to manage its own show. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Ks) said, “Eliminating Saturday delivery is not a solution”. He thinks it’s the service’s shortcomings that are the problem, that “smart reforms … to make sure the Postal Service can compete in a digital world” are the answer, but the “new business model” that would permit the USPS to dream up entrepreneurial services are precisely what Congress’s indifference has year after year failed to authorize.
Other reactions were just muddle-headed. Gerald Connoly (D, Va) somehow concluded that canceling Saturday delivery would “exacerbate USPS revenue losses” [emphasis added] and that it would “contribute to the decline of this constitutionally mandated service to all Americans”. He was not the only one who mention the Constitution, but it says only, “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads”. That can be interpreted only two ways, it would seem: either government did its establishing long ago and has no business forever tethering the postal system to its leash; or, a government-run service was intended and the postal service should never have been set adrift to fund itself.
Polls show that 70% approve of the reduced delivery schedule, but Democrats are alarmed that postal union members will lose their jobs, Congress members of all stripes seem only to hear from complainers, and votes trump “any rational analysis of our current financial condition and business options”, as postal management says. The USPS is not directly funded by taxpayer dollars, but to cover its losses, it must borrow from the government. So with no way to repay, mandated Saturday delivery is a $2 billion charge handed back to taxpayers, as is the rest of the money it must borrow.
But not to worry, Congress says it will take up the Saturday question — in a couple of years.
Donahue is desperate to make the reforms necessary to put the service on a sound financial footing. To overcome that $15.9 billion annual deficit and counteract the steady decline in volume requires deep cutbacks for an operation that is the nation’s second largest employer after Wal-Mart. The postmaster general wants to eliminate 220,000 of 522,000 postal jobs, and along with them shutter 252 of 487 mail processing centers. He wants to reduce business hours at 13,000 post offices (some 80% lose money, and he had wanted to close nearly 3,700 but there’s a federal stricture that forbids closing post offices for solely economic reasons).
But Saturday delivery is far from the biggest problem Congress has failed to deal with. In 2006, they and the Bush administration unaccountably passed a law that requires the USPS to fund in advance — and do so across a mere ten years — 75 years of future retirees’ pension benefits. No other government agency suffers this colossal burden. It comes to $5.5 billion a year, and the USPS per force defaulted last year. It had already bled $49 billion into this fund and, facing by September projected cash that will cover less than three days of operations, it simply doesn’t have money.
Our question: The 9% who approve of Congress. What inspires their approval?
Apr 23 2013 | Posted in
Policy |
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2012 was the hottest year in U.S. history, warmer than ever for all 48 contiguous states, with records set in nineteen; Australia just concluded its hottest summer ever, preceded by years of drought and wildfires; melting of the Arctic ice cap set
records last year, receding even faster than predicted; a superstorm devastated New York and environs, the biggest of 11 major weather events that brought us a flurry of tornados and droughts of our own; and recently April was the cruelest month in Argentina, with the entire month’s average of 13 inches of rain falling in just 12 hours, flooding the city of La Plata and causing over 50 deaths.
The list of calamities seems to have no end, a consequence, climate scientists believe, of increased climate warming. In fact, NASA’s James Hansen, the first to sound the alarm about global warming before Congress in 1988, says “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
How’s that again? Temperatures have not been rising?
True. And it’s a fact that has climate scientists like Hansen puzzled. Heat records set around the world, but the overall global temperature has plateaued in recent years. It is as if the new climate extremes of hot and cold have canceled each other out.
turning down the heat
There’s more. Forecasts of global temperature increases are based on computer-generated simulations of natural weather phenomena into which are fed assumptions of mankind’s expanding uses of pollutants. Whereas a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is thought to account for a 1°C (1.8°F) rise in temperature over the last century and a half, other heat-trapping factors added to mainstream models say that, if we keep to our present course, the global temperature will rise a good deal more. The general consensus is a ruinous median of 3°C or so (5.4°F) by the end of the century and “values higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded”. That’s been the conclusion of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their 2007 report (its update is expected in September).
But along have come other, more recent studies, relying on different methodologies, that say temperature rises won’t be that severe. The IPCC model is extremely detailed, building its forecasts from an Earth divided into small segments that “do not respond to new temperature readings. They simulate the way the climate works over the long run, without taking account of what current observations are”, explains an article in The Economist.
In contrast, models used for the more more recent studies are not so detailed, treating the Earth as a whole. One of them that does plug in the world’s current temperature readings says the century’s temperature increase may be in the range of only 1.0-3.0°C, with a mean of 1.6°C (2.8°F). That would be good news, were it not still bad news.
skeptic satisfaction
While scientists grapple with what might be causing the leveling of global temperatures (there are other factors such as clouds, water vapor, volcanic expulsion and soot that influence), deniers of climate change have been quick to latch onto the ten-year temperature-change hiatus as proof that global warming is a hoax. But that willfully ignores the temperature rise of the preceding century and its correlation with the increase of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.
It is an undisputed fact of physics that carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases, meaning that they trap heat from being radiated out of the atmosphere. The world is adding that carbon to the atmosphere at a staggering rate — of all that mankind has set loose since 1750, one quarter was released over just the last decade. Carbon dioxide has gone from its pre-industrial level of about 278 parts per million (ppm) to more than the 391 ppm measured last September, with 1.8 ppm now added each year, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank.
Too many forces are at play that will cause the rise in global temperatures to resume. For example, the International Energy Agency said in December that, thanks to China, coal will likely rival oil as the world’s largest source of energy within five years, increasing by 1.2 billion metric 
tons a year. China is approaching the point where it will consume as much coal yearly as all other nations combined.
Hansen is certainly undeterred by the counterclaims against warming. The scientist who said that if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, accelerated Alberta tar sands extraction will be “game over” in the fight against global warming, Hansen recently announced that he is leaving NASA to campaign full time for political and legal action to stem climate change. His was not the only NASA voice. Fellow climate researcher Gavin Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a Science article that on our present course “climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization has seen in its entire existence”.
Thousands of scientists concur and even the public gets the picture. Awakened by Hurricane Sandy, 4 of 5 polled in December by the Associated Press and GfK, a German consumer research outfit, were persuaded that climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done. That’s an increase from 73% when the question was asked in 2009. A Duke University survey released in February found that 64% strongly or somewhat favor regulating pollution from power plants and factories and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources.
missing: common sense
Because the climate is almost certainly changing, we need to ensure that whatever human contribution might be a factor is minimized. Instead of dividing into factions that imperil the future of humanity, shouldn’t we be guided by a few sensible precepts:
» If the climate is changing without human contribution, and we reduce CO2, that is a win (national security, balance of payments, pollution, energy independence, etc.).
» If the climate is changing with human contribution, and we reduce CO2 and ameliorate it, that is a win (the above list, plus climate).
» If the climate is changing without human contribution, and we do not reduce CO2, we lose major benefits (see the first scenario).
» If the climate is changing with human contribution, and we do not reduce CO2, we have a real disaster on our hands.
Conclusion? Four scenarios with only one of them a disaster and the other three either OK or better.
And yet government allows year after year to go by without action anywhere nearly sufficient to turn down the heat. Congress is of course worse than useless. Bought off by the fossil fuel industries, it acts to block any forward movement with its willful unconcern for the country’s future.
Which leaves the president and the executive branch.
why the delay, mr. president?
Right after his election in 2008, President Obama said to a gathering of governors and foreign officials, “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response… My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process”. Then, in his first inaugural we heard him say, “We’ll work tirelessly to…roll back the specter of a warming planet”.
No all-embracing tireless effort came of that. He can boast of his signal achievement of nearly doubling the efficiency standards for autos to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, which is expected to cut oil consumption by 12 billion barrels as the standard ratchets upward between now and then. But he scuttled the ozone restrictions proposed by his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and went no further on other fronts.
Last November in his acceptance speech after re-election he said, “We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”
Forgetting Rahm Emanuel’s dictum about never letting a crisis go to waste, he missed the singular opportunity right after Hurricane Sandy to go before the American people with a speech devoted entirely to the need for climate action, an educational speech to rally public support against entrenched interests. He let the moment pass and Sandy Hook Elementary School replaced Sandy, re-directing Obama’s emphasis to gun control.
Yet in January’s second inaugural he said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations”, raising expectations once again that he would finally make climate legislation a focus of his second term.
No over-arching program so far.
There is much Obama can do entirely on his own authority by executive order and the EPA’s exercise of the Clean Air Act, with which the Supreme Court agreed that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and therefore subject to regulation. Obama could even set a national cap on greenhouse gases by all industry, says the Center for Biological Diversity.
A major step in that direction could come April 13th, when the EPA is due to issue greenhouse gas limits for power plants. The public comment period elicited a record 2.67 million responses, but the power industry is still putting up a fight. After decades of skirting rules requiring them to retrofit plants with pollution devices, after rule relaxations and waivers, especially from the Cheney energy regime, the coal-fired companies are claiming that gas-fired plants have an unfair advantage if a single ruling applies to all, as if the new regulations will come as a surprise.
And yet, Obama continues to speak of his “all of the above” policy for oil and gas and is widely expected to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. So just where does he stand?
Americans seem rather savvy in the matter. Those surveys mentioned earlier also reveal that only 45% think Obama will take major action to fight climate change in his second term. That’s only slightly more than the 41% percent who think he won’t.
Apr 22 2013 | Posted in
Energy & Climate |
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“The next few weeks represent a once in a generation opportunity to harden the nation’s gun laws” said a New York Times edit a month after the killings at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut. “With the deaths of Newtown’s children still so fresh, the public will be repulsed by lawmakers who stand aside and do nothing”.
We were not so optimistic. On this page in December we had said, “Who can say whether the passage of months will again — as it always has — erode resolve and see the nation’s leaders drift away from action, if not by the President, then by a Congress that did nothing even when one of their own was shot”, referring to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
“Drift away” turned out to be the inapt term, but the result was the same. The Senate voted to scuttle every proposed gun reform — a ban on assault weapons, a prohibition against magazines exceeding ten rounds, and the one measure that seemed possible, expanding background checks — following the rules of our new form of democracy that requires a super-majority for anything to change, and is ruled by a special interest group that can trump the desires of 90% of the public, that being the overwhelming majority of the public that in polling wanted background checks for all gun buyers. So after the horror of Newtown, and before that Aurora and Virginia Tech and Columbine, absolutely nothing will have changed, leaving us to await the next school massacre.
Is this what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”? Did they really have in mind that democracy only begins at a 60% vote threshold, and, short of that, the majority is to be thwarted and the minority is to rule?
As for background checks, we are left with the illogic that those who buy a weapon in a gun store will have their backgrounds looked into, but the other 40% — among whom are criminals and the mentally disturbed — can execute an end run to buy at a gun show, where no one checks anything more than for a valid credit card.
the grip of the nra
Half the households in America are the quiet owners of some 300 million firearms, but it is the highly vocal NRA, with only 4.5 million members, that wins media attention. Its chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, has tirelessly waged a campaign of fear, describing this country as a violent dystopia, warning us of “Hurricanes. Riots. Terrorists. Lone criminals. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival”. “It must be terrifying to be Wayne LaPierre”, wrote Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon.com.
He has a particular animus toward President Obama, declaring this past election “the most dangerous … in our lifetime”. Time magazine reports him at rallies saying, “That lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!”. In a speech at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) he said, “All that first-term lip service to gun owners is part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term”.
That the government is the enemy is what the NRA “ginned up”, to use President Obama’s words. Several took up this theme. Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said on one of the channel’s blogs, “the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government”. In defense of assault rifles he wrote in the Washington Times that the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.” Even longtime Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is taken in by this meme: “When the universal background checks don’t work, then registration will be proposed to enforce them. And when that doesn’t work, because criminals won’t register their guns, we may be looking at confiscation”. No one in government has made any move toward or spoken of confiscation. None of the proposed laws take guns out of circulation. Yet that phobia was the basis for Grassley’s voting in committee against a bill calling for background checks.
And that is the lurking fear of many gun advocates — that civil unrest caused by joblessness and income disparity, say, could bring the increasingly militarized police forces of the country or the military itself into our streets to crush civilian uprisings.
“The principle underlying the Second Amendment is resistance to federal tyranny,” says David Kopel of the Cato Institute. “The weapons that would be most suited to overthrow a dictatorial federal government would, of course, be weapons of war, and not sports equipment”.
It is this paranoia that has sent thousands to the sales counters of gun shops across the country, right after Obama was first elected and with a huge uptick after Sandy Hook. Sales are booming. Gun manufacturer Mossberg is running three shifts a day. That distrust of government, mixed with anger that now even presidents can be black, has also led to a huge swelling of gun-toting hate groups in the U.S. In its census a year ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that, “from 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274”.
amending the amendment
The NRA and gun proponents militate for their perceived rights behind a barricade of a revised Second Amendment. Before the NRA began campaigning three decades ago, the interpretation of the amendment
“was a settled question, and the overwhelming consensus, bordering on unanimity, was that the Second Amendment granted a collective right”, not an individual right, to bear arms, Carl Bogus, a professor who served as editor of “The Second Amendment in Law and History”, tells us. It wasn’t even debated. A Washington Post article cites research by Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York that unearthed only 11 articles on the subject in law journals between 1911 and 1959, all of which voiced the prevailing view that the amendment referred to “citizen service in a government-organized and -regulated militia”, and that despite enactment at the midpoint in 1934 of the National Firearms Act, which apparently caused little stirring of a contrarian opinion. By the ‘90s, Spitzer counted 87 in that decade alone, most taking the new individual right position.
Which makes it remarkable that the NRA could have turned this about to such a degree that the Supreme Court in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller would rewrite all precedent. In his majority opinion Justice Antonin Scalia said, “The second amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, unconnected with service in a militia”.
That view has become the norm. Politicians routinely speak of “protecting our Second Amendment rights”, meaning the right of individuals to bear arms. Even the president says this, and in states around the country laws are being re-written to permit open carry of guns.
Pushing the NRA to extremes is yet another group, Gun Owners of America, with only 300,000 members. They were encouraged to flood Coburn’s inbox with e-mail, and that purportedly caused Coburn to wimp out of the deal with Schumer. Yet here we see a senator caving in to a tiny sliver of malcontents so over the edge that they lobby to eliminate gun-free school zones, want no restriction on gun issuance to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and are working to get rid of background checks altogether. (By February, the FBI had denied 72,659 attempted gun purchases under the background check system; half had criminal records).
one way street
It is pretty much settled that Americans will be allowed to own guns. What should bother all Americans, however, is that the NRA’s absolutist stance has made for a perversion of the democracy that the organization presumably believes it defends. With its refusal to compromise and its threats to campaign against any Congress member who dares break ranks, it is the NRA that has created a tyranny. Their policy is to force their rules — all of them — on the country. The rest of the public is to have no say whatever.
Apr 18 2013 | Posted in
Politics |
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