Monthly Archives: September 2006

The Big Dog Bites

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Be sure to read the transcript of President Clinton’s Fox News interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace tried to hang “aren’t you really responsible for September 11” on Clinton, and Clinton wasn’t having it.

WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them [al Qaeda] out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people. …

…WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right…

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..

WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir…

CLINTON:…

WALLACE: I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question?

CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know…

Exactly the same stuff I was saying here. No one has yet held the Bush Administration accountable for their terrible lapses in judgment about al Qaeda and terrorism in the eight months before 9/11. The nation literally was less protected from al Qaeda by September 2001 than it had been in September 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. Then the scum had the nerve to claim they are somehow uniquely suited to guard the nation’s security. And they got away with it.

The whole nation needs an intervention.

More CGI

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Yesterday Colin Powell was riding around the halls of the Manhattan Sheraton on a scooter. I swear this is true. Sometime yesterday I stepped on an elevator and, just before the doors closed, Mr. Powell himself scooted in on a scooter. He scooted out on the next floor. Weird.

In spite of the fact that I spent a big chunk of the morning venting about how the book publishing industry got screwed up, I am still at the CGI conference, which should wrap up early this afternoon. You can tell we’re coming down to the wire, because this morning the breakfast spread put out next to the press room, which yesterday featured a generous selection of baked goods, was down to three bran muffins. And I got here early. Too bad about everybody else.

The big news yesterday was Richard Branson’s pledge of $3 billion to combat global warming. As of the most recent press release total commitments for this week’s conference totals $5.7 billion. This money doesn’t go to the Clinton Global Initiative organization but directly to the projects and people doing the good work.

Right now, Mr. Clinton is announcing that Jim Zogby is committed to a project in the Middle East. It seems to be a youth outreach project, but don’t quote me. Eventually the details will show up on the CGI web site, I trust.

Also just announced: Wal-Mart is committing $1 million this first year to repackage products in a way to save oil, trees, and whatever else goes into packaging. (Speaking of Wal-Mart, Ezra is right about Item #2.)

There really is a lot of good work coming out of this conference, and the best part is that it isn’t all talk. My frustration with the Take Back America conference last summer was that it was all talk. Panels would convene and say, this is a problem, and somebody ought to do something. And everybody would say yep, and that would be it.

Now Barbara Streisand is on stage committing to something. I’m watching on a screen from the press room, btw; I’m not seeing La Streisand in person. Oh, well. This morning some of us bloggers got a how d’you do and handshake from Senator Hillary Clinton, who was very warm and gracious and friendly. She looks great, too.

I saw the real rock star yesterday, though — Al Gore. He took part in a panel called “Building a Sustainable Future,” at which I took notes, but my notes are at home now. The gist of it was about sustainable use of resources and business practices for both the public and private sector.

I’m about to pack up my laptop and head home. See ya later.

HarperCollins Trade Books Production Department: Let’s Dish

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The following blog post will probably bore the stuffing out of most people, but I wanted to vent.

According to an item in today’s New York Times, the publication of Andrew Sullivan’s new book has been delayed.

The entire print run of “The Conservative Soul,” a new book by Andrew Sullivan, the blogger and political commentator, is being discarded after Mr. Sullivan spotted a significant production error in the text: half of the fifth chapter had been inserted into the middle of the sixth chapter. Writing on his blog (time.blogs.com/daily_dish), Mr. Sullivan called the mistake “every writer’s nightmare, especially as I discovered the error myself while rereading the book late one night last week and couldn’t believe my eyes.” The finished books were already en route to retailers, so HarperCollins recalled the print run of 26,500, ordered a reprinting and delayed the publication date by one week, to Oct. 10 from Oct. 3. Kate Pruss, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, said the printer would cover the additional costs. (The total cost of the error has not been determined.) No editorial content will be changed in the reprinted edition, Ms. Pruss said. JULIE BOSMAN

Prediction: Sometime today some rightie bloggers will claim the book was sabotaged by liberals. But I’m going to guess it was sabotaged either by outsourcing or downsizing, or both.

Without looking at the books I can’t say for sure, but it sounds as if the books were trimmed and bound with a signature out of order. This is an error that would have been made by the printer/binder, which I’m sure is an outside vendor. It’s been generations since publishers printed and bound their own books.

In brief, the process works this way: several pages (usually anywhere from 8 to 32) are printed on one big sheet of paper, and then that piece of paper is folded and the folded paper trimmed to separate the pages. Pages printed together this way make a signature. The signatures are gathered together (hopefully in order) and bound into the book. These days this process is all done by big printer-binder machines.

Back in the day it was standard procedure for the printer/binder to pull some gathered signatures (called F and Gs, for “folded and gathered”) off the printer-binder machine before binding and send them to the publisher, so that the publisher could make sure the signatures were in order. If in fact someone at HarperCollins saw F&Gs and the signatures of the F&Gs were out of order, but HarperCollins staff signed off on them, then the fault is HarperCollins’s and not the printer/binder’s. (It is possible, but extremely unlikely, that the F&Gs were OK even though the books were mis-bound.)

Back in the days when books were set by photo-offset process there was another step before F&Gs, called “blues.” Blues are blueprints of the photographic plates. The publisher received sets of blues that had been folded and gathered as the printed pages would be. The publishing production staff could check page and signature order (and other stuff) at that stage, before the actual printing. But now that photo-offset is being phased out in favor of an all-digital process, blues are going the way of raised metal type.

Over the years book publishers have been cutting more and more corners to save time and cost, and it is entirely possible that all of the checkpoints were eliminated for Andy’s book. If so, no one at HarperCollins cast eyes upon the product from the time production transmitted PDF files of the pages to the printer/binder and the time a box of the first printed and bound copies showed up in the publisher’s offices, by which time the rest of the 26,500 print run was bound and boxed and being loaded onto trucks.

On the other hand, if someone at HarperCollins did sign off on the F&Gs, likely it was a junior staffer who was swamped with a workload that would have been handled by two or three people 20 years ago.

The first books I was responsible for producing, back in the early 1970s, were printed by linotype, meaning raised metal type. When F&Gs hit my desk I had a couple of days to check them before I called the printer and gave an OK to go ahead and bind. I was expected to be painstaking and go through the book front to back several times looking for the several things that can go wrong at that stage before signing off. Today, if a staffer sees F&Gs at all, he or she is usually under a gun to give the approval that same day, or possibly within two or three hours. If the same staffer is already swamped with other books on critical deadline — well, mistakes are made.

When I got my first publishing job, ca. 1973, all of the manuscript development, editing, copyediting, and proofreading typically were done in house. By the time a book was published, several people on the publisher’s staff had examined every page, at several points in the manuscript-to-bound-books process, looking for errors. New staffers were trained in editing, copyediting, and proofreading procedures by senior staffers. Over the years more and more of the editorial functions have been outsourced or subcontracted, however. Today most copyediting and proofreader are freelanced, and good luck finding competent people who have received real training. Increasingly even manuscript development and substantive editing are freelanced, or subcontracted to a book packager. It is not unusual for a book to be published without anyone on the publisher’s regular payroll actually reading it.

Changes in technology introduce new ways for books to be screwed up. The old linotype guys who did the typesetting and created the metal plates for printing were artisans who caught many errors themselves; also, proofs would be read independently by both printers’ and publishers’ staffs. Then we switched to offset process. The linotype operators, who were Union workers, were laid off, and compositors/printers hired nonunion people (mostly young women fresh out of high school) with typing skills to keyboard the manuscript. The keyboarders rarely caught old errors but were champs at introducing new ones. But at least we could still see as many passes of proofs as we needed to ensure the books were thoroughly checked.

Once photo-offset became the standard procedure, page composition and printing/binding were done by two separate vendors.
Vendor #1, the compositor, would keyboard the manuscript and output galley proof. After proofreading and correcting, the vendor output clean “repro” proof, which would be shipped to the publisher. Usually someone at the publisher’s staff would paste the repro proof on boards to make up pages. The boards were shipped to vendor #2, the printer, to be photographed, and the images on the film were transferred to the printer plates or rollers by a chemical process. Again, the publisher re-checked the book at every step.

Desktop publishing changed procedures again, because pasteup was eliminated. It became standard to require authors to submit word processing files, so keyboarding was also eliminated. Some publishers had in-house desktop departments; others continued to use vendors. Most of the time clean, corrected pages were sent to the printer/binder by whoever did the composition, and the printer/binder photographed the pages, but in the case of complicated four-color books sometimes the compositors output film.

Now it’s all digital. The author submits Microsoft Word files of his book, which are edited, and the edited files are given to somebody (often a freelancer) who uses desktop publishing software to compose the pages. These pages are proofread once, maybe by another freelancer. With luck, somebody at the publisher gets a look at a second set of proof to make sure corrections were made, but that individual won’t have time to do a second proofreading. Instead, the staffer only skims the old “foul” proof looking for proofreader marks, and then checks new proof to be sure the error was corrected. Then the desktop compositor outputs PDF files, which are sent to a printer, and the printer imposes the files into signatures (some magazine publishers are using software that creates imposed PDF files; I’m not sure if book publishers are doing that yet) and transfers the digital impositions onto printing plates.

Sometimes in the case of mass market books two books are printed at the same time from the same plates, so that if the signatures get out of order chunks of Bodice Ripper #1 might end up in Bodice Ripper #2. It’s also possible this happens a lot and no one notices. But if you ever read a paperback romance novel in which the heroine’s name inexplicably changes from Mary to Jane, blame the printer.

It’s a wonder to me that more oopsies don’t happen. Yet the urge to downsize and outsource continue. We production editors used to joke that at least the Suits couldn’t ship our jobs overseas. We were wrong. We’re approaching the stage at which no one with hands-on responsibility for producing books for American readers speaks English. I’m serious.

So, Andy, I’m sorry about your book. At least the problem was caught before the copies were put on display at Barnes and Noble.

The War on Bad Metaphors

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I’m blogging at you from the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative conference. The 8 a.m. (8 a.m.? In New York City? This may be the city that never sleeps, but at 8 a.m. it’s damn groggy) session featured Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, moderated by Fareed Zakaria.

A point made by speakers yesterday, and repeated this morning, is that the metaphorical war we are fighting is the wrong metaphorical war. Instead of the War on Terrorism, speakers say, we should be fighting the War on Extremism.

I agree. And, one would think, President Bush ought to agree as well. Yesterday at the UN he said,

At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear and moderate people who work for peace.

Note: The enemy is not “terrorism.” The enemy are ideological extremists who use terrorism as one of their tactics. But it is extremism, and the spread of extremism, that we should be fighting. Talking about a war on terrorism makes as much sense as calling World War II the War on Great Big Stuff That Blows Up.

The name is critical, I think, because by misdirecting our attention from the enemy to violence perpetrated by the enemy, it might seem that the struggle is primarily a violent one. But if the conflict is primarily ideological, we need to put more emphasis on countering ideology than perpetrating more violence. Although some military action probably is required, military action must be subservient to and supportive of political and diplomatic efforts. Instead, we put our military strategy first, and misdirect politics to support the military strategy.

Queen Rania, poised and articulate, spoke to the problem of extremism directly. Extremist ideologies that once existed only on the fringes of the Muslim world now resonate with more and more Middle Easterners, she said, and it’s important to understand why.

Our lack of knowledge of one another helps extremism spread. Westerners tend to lump all Muslims into one group. Even those who appreciate that there is a difference between Shi’ia and Sunni may not understand that there are further divisions within Shi’ia and Sunni. A nuanced approach to the people of the Middle East is critical.

It is a huge mistake, she said, to rule out a political approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of a military approach. (This line brought robust applause from the audience.) Before the recent war in Lebanon, she continued, most Lebanese were moderate, peace loving people. But over the course of two months, once moderate people were radicalized. The war pushed the entire Arabic public toward extremism; it caused the voices of peace and moderation to lose currency and become marginalized. The way to win the war on extremism is to support and strengthen the voices of moderation in the Middle East, not discredit them.

President Karzai said that he had tried to warn the West to pay attention to the spread of extremism since the Taliban came into power in 1966. Long before September 11, the Taliban was killing Muslims. They were destroying families; they ruined livelihoods by, for example, burning vineyards full of grapes. And most of all, the Taliban preached hatred. Karzai said he tried to tell the West the hate would reach them eventually. But no attention was paid, he said, because you in the West did not hurt. We didn’t pay attention until we did hurt.

Karzai also said that we in the West mistake the voices of terrorists, of the most brutal elements of the Middle East, as the voice of the people of the Middle East. This has to stop, he said.

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu radiates more sweet, selfless joy than his little body could possibly contain. No religion in the world promotes death and murder, he said. Instead, all of the world’s religions promote compassion, justice, love, caring. It is unfortunate that people misuse religion for bad purposes, like a knife intended to cut bread might be used to hurt someone.

It’s a mistake to associate the terrorism of the Middle East with Islam, the Archbishop said. If a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, it’s called Muslims terrorism; but when a Christian man blew up a building in Oklahoma, no one called it Christian terrorism. Likewise, terrorism in Northern Ireland, or the Holocaust, was not called Christian terrorism.

We humans can survive only if we survive together, the Archbishop said. We need one another. No one is totally self-sufficient without being subhuman.

To be continued.

CGI Update

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It seems the real action is on the eastern shore of the island — Hugo Chavez spoke to the UN General Assembly and called George W. Bush the devil. Daniel Trotta reported for Reuters —

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush “the devil himself” and told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday the U.S. president had left the smell of sulfur hanging in the chamber from his appearance the previous day.

The U.S. rival and close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro used his speech before the assembly to accuse the United States of myriad evils such as helping render the U.N. Security Council worthless by robbing small nations of power.

“The devil himself is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Right here,” said Chavez, who also called Bush a “world dictator.”

Speaking from the same podium from which Bush had addressed the assembly on Tuesday, Chavez said “it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.”

“The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species,” Chavez said. “We appeal to the people of the United States and of the world to halt this threat which is like a sword hanging over our heads.”

I can’t see how Chavez’s rhetoric helps anybody, but I thought you would get a kick out of it.

“We’re not going to address that kind of comic strip approach to international affairs,” said US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, as he adjusted his cape. Then Bolton leaped into the sky and flew across the East River, yelling “Your ass is MINE, Voinovich! Captain Zemo doesn’t forget!”

And here I am stuck in the basement of the Sheraton, blogging.

I am continuing this first-hand blog coverage of the “urgent issues and innovative solutions” panel at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference; see earlier post here. I’m spending so much time on this panel that I’m missing the afternoon working sessions, but there was a lot said that I wanted to be sure somebody wrote about.

Remember awhile back when ABC’s Brian Ross reported that Osama bin Laden had been offered sanctuary in Pakistan? Musharraf said this agreement was not made between the government of Pakistan and terrorists. Rather, it was an agreement between a jirga (consultative council) of tribal elders in North Waziristan and the Taliban. Government officials were represented in the negotiations, but it’s actually the jirga‘s agreement, according to Musharraf. The basic provisions of the agreement are these:

1. Members of al Qaeda may remain in North Waziristan as long as there is no al Qaeda activity either in North Waziristan or across the border in Afghanistan.

2. Same thing goes for members of the Taliban.

3. There must also not be attempts at “Talibanization” in North Waziristan. “Talibanization” was defined by President Musharraf as a mindset that rejects music and television and enforces strict codes of conduct and appearance, such as making all men wear beards. The Taliban may not force other people in a community to abide by their rules, in other words.

There were no follow up questions on this point, so one asked Musharraf if this agreement might give sanctuary to Osama bin Laden if he popped up in North Waziristan and abided by the rules.

Musharraf said this agreement is already working. Yesterday some Pakistani Taliban crossed the border into Afghanistan to do mischief. Local tribal leaders who were signatories to the agreement arrested ten of these Taliban and turned them over to the Pakistani government.

Musharraf spoke at length at what he called “misperceptions” about terrorism and Islam. The turmoil began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Pakistan joined the West in this fight against Soviet expansion. Pakistan’s contributions to the Cold War were critical to defeating the Soviets, he said.

But now we suffer from the fallout, he said. We helped the West, but in 1989 we were left high and dry to fend for ourselves. We took in 4 million refugees from Afghanistan, including Muhajadeen, and we got no assistance from the West. Then the Taliban formed. On top of this, he continued, we have problems on our eastern borders with terrorism in Kashmir. Our national fabric was destroyed by the fallout from Afghanistan, and we got no assistance whatsoever to rebuild it.

The real problem is not terrorism, he said, but extremism, and you can’t defeat extremism militarily. Instead, one must address problems in the “environment,” by which I infer he meant society and culture, so that the environment is no longer conducive to growing terrorism. Muslims feel they are being targeted by the West, which fuels alienation, which fuels extremism. Incidents like the infamous Danish cartoon flap only rubs salt in the wounds. Further, the extremists are convinced that modernization is westernization. Yet there is nothing in Islam that forbids modernization. And since Islam encourages making decisons by consensus, it is not in theory hostile to democracy.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are very different, from Musharraf’s perspective, because the Taliban has its roots in the people of Pakistan, whereas al Qaeda are foreigners. This makes the Taliban a more intractable problem for Musharraf.

And the absolute foundation of Muslim unrest, said Musharraf, is the “Palestinian dispute.”

I see that Dave Johnson has posted about this morning’s panel also. And here is a real boring “MSM” story about the conference so far.

Nooz

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Here’s some nooz for you, and maybe news, also: This morning’s “urgent issues and innovative solutions” panel here at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference featured an interesting exchange between Thomas “My World Is Flat” Friedman and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

This is from my notes, and the quotes may not be exact. Musharraf was asked to speak to the situation in Afghanistan. The increasing power of the Taliban, said Musharraf, has a lot to do with the presence of foreign troops; the people of Afghanistan feel antipathy toward foreign troops.

Including U.S. troops, Friedman asked. Yes, said Musharraf.

So, we are part of the solution and part of the problem, said Friedman.

Part of the problem, said Musharaff.

(Scattered applause from audience.)

Jude Nagurney Camwell of Iddybud had the sense to bring a recording device, so she’s got an audio of the whole thing. Maybe one of us can figure out how to post an audio link to selected portions of the program.

Javier Solona, who is Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, inspired another nooz zinger. He was speaking to the work he did to diffuse tensions surrounding the Danish cartoon flap. Of course we respect free speech, he says, but if we are serious about reducing the divides that exist in the world, we need to exercise some responsibility and prudence in the terms we use to talk about Islam

Is one of those terms Islamic fascism? Friedman asked. Solona sort of nodded and shrugged, but I didn’t catch an audible answer.

Did I mention First Lady Laura Bush was there?

The Clinton Global Initiative is, basically, a big whoop-dee-doo conference of heads of state and other big shots of business and religion to address global challenges. There are working sessions in four general areas: (1) energy and climate change; (2) global health; (3) poverty alleviation;and (4) reducing religious and ethnic conflict. I plan to listen in to these from the press room. What makes CGI different from other big whoop-dee-doo conferences is that people are challenged to make specific action commitments, and if they don’t keep their commitments they don’t get to come to next year’s CGI. In this way, people can’t just show up for the free buffets and not think about global challenges until the next conference.

The commitment process is vaguely similar to accepting Jesus at a revival; some people who have made commitments come up to the podium and publicly sign their agreement, then get their picture taken with Big Bill. You can browse commitments here. Last year’s was the first CGI conference, at which 300 commitments worth $2.5 billion were made.

Now, back to the nooz.

The plenary session took place in huge conference room at the Sheraton on the Upper West Side. Some of us bloggers planted ourselves on the edge of the platform built for the television cameras. We had a line of tripods in back of us and a line of very large security guys — Secret Service, maybe — in front of us. You can spot the security guys because they all have plastic coils coming out of their ears and running down the back of their coats. As I couldn’t see much else, I watched the back of the coat in front of me. It was black. Sometimes the security guy would shift his position a bit, and then I could glimpse one of the big screens or even the actual person speaking.

President Clinton spoke first and talked about how CGI is about tackling big global challenges in bite-size pieces. Then Laura Bush spoke about how her husband’s administration wants to build partnerships between governments and business to address poverty. These transactions must be transparent, Mrs. Bush said, and government must invest in their people. Wow sounds like the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, huh? Oh, wait …

Then Steve Chase and Jean Chase and some other guy accepted Jesus and signed their commitments, and we crashed ahead to the above-mentioned panel.

Beside Friedman, Musharraf, and Solona, the panelists were President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia and President Alvaro Uribe Velez of Colombia. President Velez emphasized his country’s need for reduction in violent crime and the need for agrarian reform, notably reform that would prevent so many farmers from growing coca. President Johnson-Sirleaf wants to help her people grow beyond subsistence farming and help young people develop the job skills that would attract capital investment in her country.

Musharraf provided most of the morning’s juicy bits. He discussed the difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban, from his perspective — al Qaeda members tend to be foreigners who move into Pakistan, but the Taliban takes root among the local folks. According to Musharraf, Mullah Omar (remember Mullah Omar? I haven’t heard his name in quite a while) still runs the Taliban.

I’m going to come back and add to this in a bit; let me get this much published while the wireless connection is working.

Schlepping

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I’m hanging out at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in the Manhattan Sheraton today, since the Clinton folks offered press credentials and I thought, what the hell. I can go pretend to be a reporter, or something. There are supposed to be other bloggers here beside the group in Harlem last week, most of whom probably couldn’t make it.

So I packed up my laptop and emergency clean shirt, and here I am.

This morning’s big news is that the White House has, apparently, dropped their plans to “clarify” Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Kate Zernike writes for the New York Times:

The new White House position, sent to Capitol Hill on Monday night, set off intensified negotiations between administration officials and a small group of Republican senators. The senators have blocked President Bush’s original proposal for legislation to clarify which interrogation techniques are permissible and to establish trial procedures for terrorism suspects now in United States military custody.

The two sides were said to be exchanging proposals and counterproposals late Tuesday in a showdown that could have substantial ramifications for national security policy and the political climate heading toward Election Day.

The developments suggested that the White House had blinked first in its standoff with the senators, who include John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and John McCain of Arizona. But few details were available, and it was not clear whether a compromise was imminent or whether the White House had shifted its stance significantly.

However,

The senators propose to provide clearer guidelines for interrogators by amending the War Crimes Act to enumerate several “grave breaches” that constitute violations of Common Article 3.

Several issues appeared to remain in flux, among them whether the two sides could agree on language protecting C.I.A. officers from legal action for past interrogations and for any conducted in the future. Beyond the issue of interrogations, the two sides have also been at odds over the rights that should be granted to terrorism suspects during trials, in particular whether they should be able to see all evidence, including classified material, that a jury might use to convict them. [Emphasis added]

See Digby for more commentary.

Depressed As Hell

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Not good. See also Chris Bowers.

Update: Steve Soto:

Gallup is the only pollster that is showing Bush’s approval rating back in the mid-forties, but I am not surprised.

Bush is focusing on his Daddy Protector image because it’s the only selling point he left with anyone, especially the cultists. Bashing the media and Democrats for being against him is Bush’s way to drive up his numbers with the base and get those approval ratings to a safe enough number so that the wingers don’t stay home on Election Day. The president commands all the news cycles, and Democrats lack a single voice of opposition that can get an alternate message into the same news cycle. Neither Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi are suited to that task, yet it is critical that both of them designate one member from each house to rebut everything Bush says every day and get the opposing view into the same cycle. Pelosi already made sure that John Murtha responded to Bush’s appearance at the UN today so that his remarks are already being covered side-by-side with Bush’s. Reid needs to find a telegenic designee who can do the same for Senate Democrats right away.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for Democrats to challenge Bush in every news cycle. There needs to be a national Democrat like Murtha and Joe Biden to get the Democratic viewpoint out there every day, and prevent the White House from sweeping bad news bad news from Iraq under the rug every day, like the news that our military needs to send more troops into Iraq, and that drawdown plans are more distant now than they ever have been. Yet for all his rhetoric today at the UN about wanting to reach out to Islamic nations, Bush has still not called for a regional security and economic development summit to stabilize Iraq, and bring its neighbors into the solution and invest in them some responsibility for making it happen. This is something right up Biden’s alley. Democrats need to understand that as the Gallup poll shows, unless voters are reminded of how bad things have gotten in Iraq every day, Bush will be able to convince many likely voters that we were right to invade.

Torturers ‘R’ Us

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I regret I’ve gotten behind in my blogging; I’ve not been feeling entirely well, and now I’m going into a busy week. I haven’t abandoned the “Ten Days After” project (in fact, I’m thinking about expanding it), but it’s going to have to lag behind a bit.

But without further ado, here is a torture news roundup.

My buddy The Talking Dog (the Rottweiler photo is deceptive; he is really a Chesapeake Bay Retriever) has an exclusive interview with Dr. Steven Miles, the author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror. The book is, the Dog says,

… a scathing examination of the failings of members of the medical profession serving in the military with respect to treatment of prisoners held by American forces in the war on terror, demonstrating such abuses as medical personnel participating in coercive interrogations if not outright torture (including using prisoners’ own medical records against them), preparing misleading, if not outright falsifying, medical records including death certificates, and failing to advocate for prisoners being placed in dangerous situations (e.g., such as under weapons fire, or in dangerously unsanitary conditions).

Be sure to read the post for a perspective on the torture issue we’re not getting from media. Also, give the doggie a pat for his fifth blogging anniversary.

Glenn Greenwald explains why pro-torture righties are really un-American, hysterical weenies.

At the Washington Post, Tom Malinowski writes,

President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using “alternative” interrogation procedures — which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the “cold cell,” in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.

Bush insists that these techniques are not torture — after all, they don’t involve pulling out fingernails or applying electric shocks. He even says that he “would hope” the standards he’s proposing are adopted by other countries. But before he again invites America’s enemies to use such “alternative” methods on captured Americans, he might benefit from knowing a bit of their historical origins and from hearing accounts of those who have experienced them. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for the president’s reading list.

Note that one of the books on the reading list is Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I remember when Gulag was published, ca. 1973. The American Right waved it in every face and insisted that it was a patriotic duty to read it in order to understand the evils of Communism. One of the torture techniques Solzhenitsyn described was sleep deprivation, which the Right hasn’t decided isn’t torture, after all, although it sounded nasty the way Solzhenitsyn described it.

Oh, wait … torture is only bad when Communists do it. When we do it, it’s fine. I forget.


Paul Krugman:

I’m ashamed that my government does this sort of thing. I’d be ashamed even if I were sure that only genuine terrorists were being tortured — and I’m not. Remember that the Bush administration has imprisoned a number of innocent men at Guantánamo, and in some cases continues to imprison them even though it knows they are innocent.

Is torture a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world? No. People with actual knowledge of intelligence work tell us that reality isn’t like TV dramas, in which the good guys have to torture the bad guy to find out where he planted the ticking time bomb.

What torture produces in practice is misinformation, as its victims, desperate to end the pain, tell interrogators whatever they want to hear. Thus Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who ABC News says was subjected to both the cold cell and water boarding — told his questioners that Saddam Hussein’s regime had trained members of Al Qaeda in the use of biochemical weapons. This “confession” became a key part of the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq — but it was pure invention.

So why is the Bush administration so determined to torture people?

To show that it can.

Conor Foley, in the UK:

The attorney general was right to warn the US government that it risks international condemnation in its attempts to free its interrogators from the “constraints” of these conventions. He should go further and tell its members that they could also be risking arrest if they visit Britain in the future.

Bob Herbert:

The president seemed about to lose it at times last week. He was fighting with everybody — tenacious reporters frustrated by the absence of straight answers about the treatment of terror suspects; key Republican senators who think it’s crazy for a great country like the U.S. to become a champion of kangaroo courts and the degradation of defendants; even his own former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who worries that the world is coming to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

It seemed that the only people the president wasn’t fighting with were the Democrats, who have gone into a coma, and the yahoos who never had much of a problem with such matters as torture and detention without trial.

As Marvin Gaye once sang, “What’s going on?”

The people at the top are getting scared, that’s what’s going on. The fog of secrecy is lifting, and the Bush administration is frightened to death that it will eventually have to pay a heavy price for the human rights abuses it has ordered or condoned in its so-called war on terror.

At Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria thinks the “American constitutional system is finally working.” I’d say that’s premature. After several paragraphs of unwarranted optimism, Zakaria gets down to business.

The crucial issue, on which former secretary of State Colin Powell and other distinguished military figures have stood up to Bush, is the treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Conventions. Powell explained to me his deep concerns about safeguarding American troops if “we start monkeying around with the common understanding of the Conventions.” The administration claims that it merely wants to provide specific guidelines, but the real aim appears to be to let CIA employees engage in “rough” interrogations without fear of legal sanctions.

Powell and the senators argue that the guidelines are better left as they are—with a kind of calculated ambiguity that deters U.S. interrogators from testing the limits. ” ‘Clarifying’ our treaty obligations will be seen as ‘withdrawing’ from them,” warns Senator Graham, a former staff judge advocate in the Air National Guard. He’s right. No other nation has sought to narrow the Geneva Conventions’ scope by “clarifying” them. Does the United States want to be the first? Why not retain the status quo and then consult with other countries that are also grappling with terror suspects and arrive at a genuinely “common” clarification of the Conventions? If we “clarify” the Conventions to allow, say, waterboarding and other “rough” procedures, what happens to a CIA operative who is captured in a foreign country? Can that country “clarify” the Conventions and torture him? If it does, would the United States have any basis to condemn it and take action under international law?

Editorial, Boston Globe:

IN THE FIGHT over rules for the interrogation and trials of terrorism suspects, there is a split — not so much between Republicans and Democrats or the White House and the Senate, but between leaders like President Bush with no combat experience and those like Colin Powell who know combat and want to maintain the Geneva Conventions as a protection for US troops. Powell prefers the bill before Congress sponsored by Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom have considerable military experience. Their bill, which the Senate Armed Services Committee approved Thursday, has deep flaws of its own, but it is a better basis for legislation than Bush’s proposal to gut the Geneva Conventions.

James Carroll:

What reservations are expressed have less to do with innate rights of the accused than with possible repercussions when enemies apply such standards to captured US soldiers. Last week, 27 retired military leaders warned Congress, “If degradation, humiliation, physical, and mental brutalization of prisoners is decriminalized” then US soldiers will suffer similarly.

But the fabric of law is spun from a single thread and when the US government deems a few individuals to be less worthy of full protections against the abuse of power , everyone is threatened.

That’s because the procedures of law — the requirement, in this example, that the accused be shown the evidence — protect not only the individual but the system itself. To say that justice must be administered blindly is to forbid favoritism toward the privileged, yes, but it is also to prevent prejudice toward the despised or dangerous.

Justice is measured in every society by how the worst malefactors are treated — the worst not only in culpability, but in capacity for general harm. The best way to combat terrorism is to wrap accused terrorists in the cloth of the law they would rip asunder. More important, to legalize the abuse of a class of prisoners is to prepare for the abuse of all.

ABC News:

Amid a debate between President Bush and bipartisan members of Congress over how harshly to question terror detainees, a former FBI agent said some of the most aggressive interrogation techniques in dispute are rarely effective anyway.

“Generally speaking, those don’t work,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent and an ABC News consultant.

Robert Parry:

George W. Bush’s Sept. 15 outburst – threatening to stop interrogating terror suspects if Congress doesn’t let him revise the Geneva Conventions to permit coercive techniques – is part of a pattern of petulance that dates back to even before the 9/11 attacks but has resurfaced as Bush faces new challenges to his authority. …

… At the Sept. 15 news conference, Bush also threatened to stop all interrogation of terrorism suspects if his demands on the Geneva Conventions weren’t met.

“We can debate this issue all we want, but the practical matter is, if our professionals don’t have clear standards in the law, the program is not going to go forward,” Bush said. “The bottom line is – and the American people have got to understand this – that this program won’t go forward; if there is vague standards applied, like those in Common Article III from the Geneva Convention, it’s just not going to go forward.”

He really is acting like a big baby. See also today’s Dan Froomkin.

My Cause Is My Country

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We’re still dealing with the fallout of the meeting with Bill Clinton. Yesterday I provided some links to the Boobapalooza Brawl; here are some more: My buddies Julia of Sisyphus Shrugs and Lindsay B. at Majikthise, as well as Jessica herself, offer opinions. I have nothing more to add.

A more legitimate criticism is that all of the attendees were white. I think it was a major gaffe that Steve Gilliard wasn’t invited, although Steve says he wouldn’t have gone, anyway. “If the choice is loyalty to a politician or loyalty to my supportive, generous and desperate for information readers, that isn’t really much of a choice is it?” he writes. That’s fair, but that was not the choice offered by the meeting. Mr. Clinton neither asked for our loyalty nor said anything particularly surprising or newsworthy in the off-the-record portion of the meeting.

The most controversial things Mr. Clinton said involved mild criticism of some other Democrats (although no one currently running for office) and some nudges at the Right in general. None of this was a big whoop-dee-doo, so why off the record? Because, I suspect, if there’s a massive blowup over somebody’s boobs, for pity’s sake, what would rightie bloggers do with nudges at the Right? Or any mention in any context of Republican politicians? Or suggestions that maybe so-and-so made a mistake when he campaigned on such-and-such an issue? And may I add that Mr. Clinton didn’t say anything that wasn’t extremely mild and tolerant compared to the stuff I say about the same people.

But did he say anything off-the-record that was really blogworthy? That you readers would find fascinating and illuminating?

Not really. Of course, you’ll have to trust me on that.

The overall purpose of the meeting was to open more dialogue between liberal bloggers and the Democratic Party. And when I say dialogue, I mean dialogue. As in a two-way conversation. Clinton praised liberal bloggers — not just the ones in the room — for our ability to respond quickly to the Rightie Media Noise Machine with facts and logic. He’s come to realize that the Democratic Party is nuts to treat us merely as ATM machines and believes the Dems should start listening to what we have to say.

This is all good, I say, for all of us, whether at the meeting or not. This is what many of us have wanted from the Dems for a very long time. We’re all hoping the meeting was only a first step in a process that will involve a far larger group of bloggers in the future.

(And may I also say to those who want to fight about who was invited, and who wasn’t — I choose not to participate, thanks. I’ve got quite enough neuroses of my own to manage without trying to deal with yours, too. So, feel free to snark away, and I will continue to ignore you.)

Christy Hardin Smith says that she checked with Peter Daou, who told her some African American and Latino bloggers were invited but could not come on such short notice. The meeting was thrown together quickly. I had known for about a week that a meeting was being planned, but didn’t know for sure if it was really going to happen (and where, and when) until the day before. I suspect a lot of people had to make a mad dash for the nearest airport to be there, although for me a trip to Harlem takes about 17 minutes on the Metro North Railroad.

There’s one seriously misreported detail I want to correct — I say it was red devil’s food cake (with cream cheese icing), not cherry cake.

On to the main issue: The question of how the Dems and liberal bloggers might work together is problematic. The Right Blogosphere more or less functions as the web auxiliary of the Republican Party. That’s not a model I want to follow. Yet when we — liberal bloggers and Dems — do pull together on an issue (the recent “Path to 9/11” flap being a good example) we’re a whole lot more effective than when we work separately.

As Peter Daou wrote in the first “triangle” essay:

Looking at the political landscape, one proposition seems unambiguous: blog power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment. Forming a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment is an essential step in creating the kind of sea change we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Simply put, without the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it’s also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy. Despite the astronomical growth of the netroots (see Bowers and Stoller for hard numbers), and the slow and steady encroachment of bloggers on the hallowed turf of Washington’s opinion-makers, it is still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people’s political views. That is not to say that blogs can’t be the first to draw attention to an issue, as they often do, but the half-life of an online buzz can be measured in days and weeks, and even when a story has enough netroots momentum to float around for months, it will have little effect on the wider public discourse without the other sides of the triangle in place. Witness the Plame case, an obsession of left-leaning bloggers long before the media and the political establishment got on board and turned it into a political liability for Rove and Bush.

The larger question surrounding the meeting is who is using whom? I’ve been amused, but not surprised, at the number of people who assume the meeting was about Hillary Clinton’s alleged presidential ambitions. Let me be clear. First, the Senator’s political career was not discussed at all. Second, most of us in the room have long been on record that we do not want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic presidential candidate in ’08. I can’t speak for everybody, but no amount of fried chicken is going to change my mind on that.

Of course, some people are still going to interpret either Clintons’ every bleat as part of their campaign to re-take the White House, no matter what I say.

Other complaints can be found in this comment thread at the Guardian “comment is free” blog. Like this guy:

The Usual Suspects were present for the soiree with Clinton because they represent the “left” that constitutes brand-name consumers. They would vote for *anything* labeled ‘Democrat,’ and Clinton knows it.

Yeah, like we all supported Joe Lieberman … oh, wait …

As I wrote in the same comments thread, why is it everyone assumes Bill Clinton is using us? Why can’t it be equally true that we are using him?

Yes, the man is flawed. Yes, he did things as President I think he shouldn’t have done, and I’m not just talking about conduct, but policies, as well. But I if the man offers himself as a tool to enable my agenda, why not take advantage? Access to power, even a tiny bit, doesn’t exactly fall into my lap every day.

If you look back at history, you see that everyone who has ever accomplished anything was flawed. Abraham Lincoln was a racist. Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, messed around with alchemy and astrology. Most of the great men of history, including the historical Buddha, were sexist. Show me somebody who accomplished anything who was without flaw or foible, and I’ll show you someone who paid off his friends to keep their mouths shut.

So to those who claim we bloggers somehow sold out our feminism or liberalism or anything else by meeting with President Clinton, I say: Bite me.

So what is my agenda? As I also wrote in the comments thread, I got into blogging to help restore some sanity to America’s sick political culture, which has become so skewed and twisted we can no longer engage in rational political dialogue, never mind make rational political decisions as a nation.

More than 50 years ago the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that the hard right-wing fringe of American politics was creating “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” Folks, they have succeeded.

The Right’s got a big chunk of the electorate conditioned to vote against their own self-interests. Mindless repetition of Republican talking points has replaced dialogue. The mainstream news media shuts out true liberalism, and in the heads of most “pundits” the extreme Right is now the “center.” Our political institutions are dysfunctional except as engines to move power and money into the hands of those in control.

In truth, the federal government of the United States of America is no longer functioning as a representative democracy. Congress and the White House are just going through the motions. If we don’t turn this around, pretty soon they won’t even bother to go through the motions.

Restoring enough sanity to my country that it can function as a representative democracy again is my cause. Beyond that, I hope that once people remember what government is supposed to be about they will stop being afraid to use government for progressive ends, such as establishing national health insurance. I want to move the political center back to, you know, the center. I want to see balance and responsibility in news media. But the overall aim is healing the sick political culture so that the government can be a government. What happens after that is, well, what happens after that.

Blogging is a means to that end, as is the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton. But blogging or Mr. Clinton or the Democrats are not my cause. My cause is my country.