Yglesias: Mexico’s Quality Flu Response
Tyler Cowen observes that the Mexican government, which doesn’t always have the best performance, seems to have handled the swine flu episode quite well:
I hesitate to speak too soon but I’m actually somewhat impressed by how the Mexican government, at least at the national level, has responded. There have been many failures of Mexican health care systems at local levels but keep a few things in mind: a) some of the problems lie with citizens who won’t go see doctors, or who won’t go see non-shaman doctors, b) too many Mexicans self-administer antibiotics, and c) when there is so much air pollution it is harder to discover flu cases, especially in the midst of flu season there. Nonetheless Mexican reporting systems seem to have discovered an unusual flu fairly promptly.
Once the national government discovered what is going on, they acted decisively and without undue panic. There has been very little denial, a common feature in the early stages of health crises (how long was it until the U.S. government acknowledged AIDS?). No one is treating the Mexican federal government like a banana republic or a basket case or thinking that the Canadian government would have done so much better.
I think this is about right. Certainly in comparison with how the Chinese government handled SARS and the avian flu outbreak, the Mexicans seem to be acting responsibly and effectively.
From DemfromCT"s Abbreviated Pundit Round-up at Daily Kos:
He is subtle and likes to kill softly. As such, he is something new on the political scene, which means he will require something new from his opponents, including, first, patience.
I am wondering once again if Republicans in Washington fully understand what they are up against.
Media Matters: * Home * About Us * Press * Video * Research * Projects In Their Own Words: The Majority's Prerogative (h/t sgw)Once a cause such as hate-crimes legislation becomes associated with something as emotionally devastating as the savage murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, it becomes difficult to question the merits of the issue.
That is one lamentable fact.
Another is that too often those articulating the merits, or lack thereof, make many of us wish we could switch planets.
Summary: In 2005, many Republican Senators went so far as to claim the filibuster of judicial nominees was unconstitutional. Now four years later, with President Obama's first Supreme Court appointment looming, will they remain consistent in their position or commit one of the most blatant acts of hypocrisy in the 220-year history of the United States Senate?In Their Own Words. . . .
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Kit Bond (R-MO)
"I am beginning to think it is a train and that there is not much way to avoid a train wreck. The train wreck I am talking about is a threat by the minority to 'shut the Senate down in every way' if the majority adopts rules that will do what the Senate has done for 200 years, which is to vote up or down the President's appellate judicial nominees." [Senate Floor Speech, 4/12/05]
"By resorting to filibustering judicial nominees who have the support of a majority of Senators, which began in 2003 by colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they are throwing overboard 214 years of Senate courtesy and tradition...The Constitution of the United States does not ...
...
... lots more at the link.
Think Progress: Ben Nelson opposes Obama’s health care plan.
President Obama has said that he would reform the health care system by establishing a “public insurance program to compete with private insurers” that would help reduce costs and guarantee coverage. But Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), whose biggest campaign donor is the insurance industry, said he’s not interested in a public option. HuffPost reports why:Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”
As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has written, “When considering health reform, policy makers have a choice to make: restructure the health insurance market so that it provides affordable and comprehensive health benefits to all Americans, or protect the monopoly of private insurers and continue redistributing as much income as possible to the private insurance industry.” Unfortunately, It appears Ben Nelson values the profits of insurers over affordable coverage for all.
Update: Nelson isn't the only Democrat withholding support for Obama's health care plan. Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) has said that he is “agnostic” about having a public plan as part of health care reform, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) said that he believes health care reform can be accomplished “without” a public option.
- Nicole Belle (C&L) adds:
Nelson plans on gathering together some like-mindedsell-outsDemocrats to oppose any public health plan. Go to Open Secrets to find out who has donated money to Nelson last few years for his re-election and whaddya know? Blue Cross/Blue Shield is in the top 5 with $31K. In fact, Nelson received more than $230,000 from the healthcare industry in the last four years. Actually, HCAN lists more than $600,000 from the insurance industry to Nelson.And so, Nelson has decided to bow to the wishes of his campaign contributors, instead of standing up for what 73% of the American public want: A choice of a public health insurance option.
In his opposition, Nelson can't even muster the courage to be honest about his motives. Instead, he parrots the latest right-wing talking point, that a public health insurance option will somehow undermine the employer-based health care system.
This point, of course, is ludicrous. How exactly would this undermining happen? Every person in America will be offered a choice. If they choose the public health insurance option, how exactly is anything being forced upon them? And if businesses choose the public health insurance option, again, how is that not a choice?
If you're of a mind to let Sen. Nelson know that his job is to represent the people of the United States, not the insurance companies, you can send him an email here. The phone numbers for his various offices are available here. Remember, you get further being polite.
Maureen Dowd is not usually my cup of tea, but I think she's right to point out the hilarity of Republicans fretting about "checks and balances."How quaint. The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.
The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a "threat to the country" and wondered if people would want the majority to rule "without a check or a balance."
Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run "roughshod" and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that "there's no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government."
Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, "This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington."
This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers' lead.)
Indeed, it's been quite a transformation for congressional Republicans, hasn't it? The same GOP lawmakers used to enthusiastically embrace phrases like "majority rule" and "up-or-down votes." Those who would dare stand in the way of measures endorsed by the president and congressional majorities were "obstructionists" and shameless "partisans." The reconciliation process was deemed a reasonable and judicious use of Senate procedures.
They rejected the very idea of administrative oversight. They saw little value in having a congressional minority even being allowed to offer amendments to legislation.
And as Dowd notes, "checks and balances" was an antiquated concept, too often touted by those with a pre-9/11 mindset. When Congress and the White House were led by members of the same party, they said, a rubber-stamp dynamic was to be expected.
The turnaround has been as fast as it is impressive.
For what it's worth, the "checks and balances" talk is largely misguided. For one thing, it's unlikely to connect with voters. The message, in effect, is, "Support the GOP to help promote gridlock on popular policy initiatives." Not exactly a winning slogan."
For another, Democrats are still Democrats. As the president reminded the press corps the other night, "I've got Democrats who don't agree with me on everything."
Sully: Torture And Motives
Matthew Schmitz doesn't want to shut down debate:
One thing that we need to avoid at this point is imputing bad motives to torture advocates; when we do so we cease to do the important work of figuring out how so many well-intentioned people ended up supporting an abominable practice. As recent debates have shown, torture advocates used the ends to justify the means. But this justification was only part of the story, because the advocates never full acknowledged the moral reality, the evil, of what they were doing. They didn’t say, “I will do a profoundly evil thing to avert a massive loss of life.” They still felt the need to find a difference between what they were doing and torture. They said, “This isn’t torture, it’s just advanced interrogation.” Had they been unable to falsely describe what they were doing, the argument would have fallen apart.
Tim F.: Two People Who Did Not Agree On Much, Agreed On One Thing
Via two posts from Sullivan, I have learned that the two most successful interrogators and spybusters from WWII, one German and one British, never harmed an inmate.
No German won as many intelligence coups as Hanns Scharff. Scharff worked for the Luftwaffe interrogating allied pilots and bomber crews, so successfully that the U.S. military taught his methods decades later.
Colonel Robin “tin eye” Stephens was a “bristling, xenophobic martinet” who ran a famously successful counterinelligence operation for MI5 out of a basement in London.
In the course of the war, some 500 enemy spies from 44 countries passed through Camp 020; most were interrogated, at some point, by Stephens; all but a tiny handful crumbled.[...] Many became double agents, secretly working for the British and sending false information back to Germany.
Scharff and Stevens broke more prisoners than anyone else in the war on either side. Interestingly, neither one ever so much as raised their voice against a prisoner.
The terrifying commandant of Camp 020 refined psychological intimidation to an art form. Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling. An inspired amateur psychologist, Stephens used every trick, lie and bullying tactic to get what he needed; he deployed threats, drugs, drink and deceit. But he never once resorted to violence. “...
Scharff was opposed to physically abusing prisoners with the intent to obtain information. Taught on the job, Scharff instead relied upon the Luftwaffe’s approved list of techniques which mostly involved making the interrogator seem as if he is his prisoner’s greatest advocate while in captivity.[...] After a prisoner’s fear had calmed, Scharff continued to act as a good friend to the prisoner, including sharing jokes, homemade food items, and occasionally alcoholic beverages. Scharff was fluent in English and knowledgeable about British customs and some American, which helped him to gain the trust and friendship of many of his prisoners.
...
Stephens cared not for morality but for results, and these were extraordinary. Once a prisoner in Camp 020 realised he was safe from physical violence, he tended to sing all the louder....
Some high profile prisoners were treated to outings to German airfields (one POW was allowed to take a German aircraft for a trial run), tea with German fighter aces, swimming pool excursions, and luncheons among other things. Prisoners were treated well medically at the nearby Hone Mark Hospital, and some POWs were occasionally taken from captivity to visit their comrades at this hospital for company’s sake as well as the better meals provided there. Scharff was best known for taking his prisoners on strolls through nearby woods, first having them swear an oath of honor that they would not attempt an escape during their walk. Scharff chose not to use these nature walks as a time to directly ask his prisoners obvious military-related questions, but instead relied on the POWs’ desire to speak to anyone outside of isolated captivity about informal, generalized topics. Prisoners often volunteered information the Luftwaffe had instructed Scharff to acquire, frequently without realizing they had done so....
Stephens did not eschew torture out of mercy. This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only 16 spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. “Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.”Confessions extracted by inflicting pain are most likely to be whatever the victim believes the torturer desires to hear, whatever is necessary to stop the agony.
...
So why do people torture? The answer is simple; when reality doesn’t suit your needs, torture lets you make your own reality. That, of course, was the goal all along.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.The aide said that guys like me were ‘’in what we call the reality-based community,’’ which he defined as people who ‘’believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’’ he continued. ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’
None of our prisoners would validate the idea that Iraq worked with al Qaeda. Then we tortured them, and they did. Amazing.
The salient point that I take home from today’s lesson is that interrogating prisoners takes patience and skill. Stephens and Schiff had the right stuff. Sadly for everyone, the GOP cult of impatient boobs needed a plan B.
***Update***
Also see: the still anonymous interrogator who found abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Sherwood Moran, a Marine interrogator who ‘broke’ supposedly fanatical Japanese soldiers with patience and cultural awareness.
commenter gbear
We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.I bet he doesn’t feel so good about the ‘all of you will be left to study what we did’ part now.
Even if these guys don’t get dragged off and tried in court, the truth of what they did will emerge. It will suck to be them.
Wheeler: Torture Tapes and Briefings
Isikoff has an article that basically catches everyone up on torture investigation. The big piece of news is that John Durham is flying spooks back from overseas stations to appear before the grand jury.
In recent weeks, prosecutor John Durham has summoned CIA operatives back from overseas to testify before a federal grand jury, according to three legal sources familiar with the case who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The sources said Durham is also seeking testimony from agency lawyers who gave advice relating to the November 2005 decision by Jose Rodriguez, then chief of the CIA's operations directorate, to destroy the tapes.
There are lawyers probably named Robert Bennett quoted as saying, "maybe he's just tying up loose ends," but that news, coupled with the news that Durham interviewed the recently-hung-out-to-dry-by-torture tape figure Porter Goss Dusty Foggo suggests Durham has been able to break the omerta at the CIA and make some headway on this case.
But I'm sort of interested in this claim:
Durham was appointed by former attorney general Michael Mukasey shortly after the December 2007 revelation about Rodriguez's decision. At the time, then-CIA director Michael Hayden insisted the tapes were destroyed only after "it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries—including the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui." But since then, declassified filings in the Moussaoui case show that around the time the tapes were destroyed, Moussaoui's lawyers were seeking CIA records about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah—who, according to recent disclosures, was waterboarded 83 times. On Nov. 3, 2005, Judge Leonie Brinkema even ordered government lawyers "to confirm or deny that it has video- or audiotapes" of interro-gations of potential witnesses.
Now, this is assuredly not news. The Moussaoui request has been on my torture tape timeline for well over a year, based on this and other reporting. And it is just one case where a party had made a legally binding request for any torture tapes--the other two being the ALCU FOIA and the 9/11 Commission request for any such materials.
(On the 9/11 Commission request, keep in mind that Philip Zelikow, Commission Executive Director, has been saying "let the prosecutor work" in his recent public critiques of torture; he may well have been interviewed in this case, so he may have reason to be confident in the quality of the invsetigation.)
Okay, back to Moussaoui. Not new news. But apparently news that Isikoff is focusing on at the moment. I'm interested in that not just because it says Durham would probably pin any indictments on an obstruction of justice charge. I'm interested because of the dates. There's the November 3, 2005 Brinkema order, sure, which almost perfectly coincides with the destruction of the tapes. But the trial discussion about Zubaydah testimony went back much earlier.
Moussaoui requested on September 10, 2002, to "Free Abu Zubaydah from CIA Torture Chamber and Bring Him in My Open Court," and on October 16, 2002, Moussaoui made a motion "to Force Leonie Brinkema and her Government to Stop Hidding Abu Zubayda and Ramzi Binalshib Testimony in my Favor." Since the CIA has now admitted it had tapes through December, both these requests were made at a time when the CIA was still making Abu Zubaydah tapes. Perhaps more interesting still is the timing of 2003 requests. In January 2003, Brinkema ruled that Moussaoui could get testimony from bin al-Shibh, though the government subsequently refused to make him available. And on February 3, 2003, Moussaoui attempted "to Get Inform About the Decision Relating to Ramzi and Abu Zubaydah and Al Liby."
On February 5, 2003, the CIA told Porter Goss--who was Director of Central Intelligence when the tapes were destroyed--and Jane Harman they were going to destroy the Zubaydah tapes.
In other words, the apparent focus on the November 3, 2005 order to turn over videotapes came only after three years of requests on Moussaoui's part to get testimony from Abu Zubaydah, and the decision to destroy the tapes was at least relayed to Congress (to Porter Goss, one of the key figures in the case) just after Brinkema first ruled that Moussaoui ought to get evidence from al Qaeda detainees.
Benen: THE NCNA GETS TO WORK....
The newly unveiled National Council for a New America officially launched yesterday, hosting a town-hall like forum for 100 people at a strip-mall pizza shop in a D.C. suburb. Leading the discussion were House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R). I've read several reports on the event, and I'm still not sure what the point was.
The initiative reflects the emerging consensus of Republican leaders on how to take on Obama and rebuild their party. Worried that the GOP is being portrayed only as the opposition party, prominent Republicans hope to draw attention to their agenda by using well-known figures such as Bush and Romney to tout their ideas. But they don't believe they need to shift their political views to the left or the right to win.
And therein lies part of the problem. This new initiative is intended to be little more than a fresh coat of paint on a car that no longer runs. There's some value in a discussion that focuses more on Republican policy than politics -- the event reportedly featured very little Obama bashing -- but these GOP leaders don't seem to appreciate the fact that their policies failed miserably and aren't popular with voters.
There were two angles to yesterday's event that were of particular interest. First, there were protestors on hand, but they were Republican critics, not Democrats.
[T]he handful of peaceful protesters out front weren't Democrats -- they were conservatives upset over the new group's agenda and leadership. They brandished signs criticizing McCain, calling the NCNA "RINOs" -- Republicans in Name Only -- and urging them to push for stricter immigration enforcement.
Improving the party's image is going to be tricky when the GOP base likes the right-wing reactionary approach just the way it is.
Those were the Republican activists outside. The Republicans inside failed to offer anything in the way of new thoughts. One concerned citizen insisted that "people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh than they do in high school or college." The future of the GOP, indeed.
And second, there were some policy-oriented questions from an obviously Republican-friendly crowd, which spoke to a larger truth. One young person asked what the government can do for people who "have aspirations to college" but can't afford it "because college expenses have gone up." Another asked what government can do "to assist small businesses."
So, at a Republican event with a Republican crowd about the future of Republican ideas, those on hand wanted to hear more about what the government can do for them.
Good luck with that rebranding, guys.
Sudbay (Americablog): The Catholic Bishops are cranky, but American Catholics aren't listening
The Catholic Bishops are still bitching about Notre Dame inviting Obama to its graduation. Because, in the warped world of the American Catholic hierarchy, that's a big issue. But, the bishops are out of touch with their parishioners:
Polls show Catholics giving high job approval ratings to Obama, and Catholic attitudes about abortion and stem-cell research largely mirror the public's.Of course it isn't resonating. The Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals often border on the absurd in terms of their outspoken priorities. A speech by the presdident at Notre Dame doesn't bother most Catholics. It's not a real issue.
"I think the bishops who believe abortion is the ultimate litmus test look at the polls and realize Catholics are not listening to them," said the Rev. Mark Massa, co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. "They're playing a very dangerous game because they do not have the moral authority they had before the sex abuse crisis, and they're trying to find a toehold and get heard."
So far, the Notre Dame saga doesn't seem to be resonating. Only about half of Catholics surveyed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life from April 23 to 27 had heard about the controversy.
Sounds like the Catholic bishops are spending too much time listening to Rush.
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