Bivens's Outrage

Almanac APB!

By Matt Bivens

In a bulletin issued Christmas Eve (a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press), the FBI warned some 18,000 police organizations across America to be on the lookout for almanacs.

Terrorists, the FBI says, use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." (No doubt they are also motivated by all of those Poor Richard's sayings found within some of them, such as "Haste makes waste," and "Have you something to destroy tomorrow? Destroy it today.")

So police officers should keep an eye out for the bulky little reference books any time they search or stop someone, "especially," says AP, "if the books are annotated in suspicious ways." (Like if, in the margins of the page about how the state flower of Minnesota is the Pink and White Lady's Slipper, there's scribble reading: "Osama bin Laden hates the Pink and White Lady's Slipper! Die, Minnesotans! Die!!", that would be suspicious.)

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December 31, 2003

The Banality of Atrocity

By Matt Bivens

"Since the war ended, the American public has been fed a dose of movies fictionalizing the excesses of US units in Vietnam, such as 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Platoon' ... [usually] focused on a single event, like the My Lai massacre. The Tiger Force case is different. The atrocities took place over seven months, leaving an untold number dead -- possibly several hundred civilians ... Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers. Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed ..." -- from the Pulitzer-worthy reporting of The Blade, Toledo's oldest newspaper.

The Blade came out in October 2003 with its five-part investigative series about those many months of routine atrocity in 1967-era Vietnam (and the subsequent decades of investigation, cover-up, indifference and uncertainty). Now The New York Times has added its own peer- review journalism -- checking out and confirming some of the work of The Blade.

The New York Times has only one quibble -- and it ought to ring true to anyone familiar with the best Vietnam war reporting, such as, for example, "The Military Half" by Jonathan Schell: The men who participated in the Tiger Force rampages deny they were a rogue unit; they, and many other experts interviewed, say that raging war-crime atrocity was simply the order of the day. So Hollywood and Americans can express shock and dismay at My Lais -- but it's essentially a dishonest reaction. Vietnam was not a war sprinkled with a few much-lamented My Lais; Vietnam was one long series of organized and approved My Lais, as policy, period.

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December 30, 2003

President Scrooge

By Matt Bivens

In a Christmas message to the American people, George W. Bush says we must "rededicate ourselves to helping those in need."

So why is the President so evasive about whether he favors extending temporary unemployment insurance? We have a tradition of, in hard economic times, offering a hand to those who've been laid off. We also have a tradition of shutting down that aid spigot when economic times are brighter -- so this is not the kind of program that grows out of control, either. Yet House Majority Leader Tom DeLay claims -- incorrectly -- that the jobs climate has improved enough that we can offer not a hand up, but an indifferent shrug. And the White House has also, whistling guiltily, looked the other way. So as Congress adjourned for its winter break, it let federal aid run out for at least two million Americans in need -- four days before Christmas. Now, some 90,000 families are running out of aid each week; by the time Congress reconvenes in January, about a half- million jobless workers will have exhausted their benefits. And according to an April 2003 survey commissioned by the National Employment Law Project, more than half of our current crop of unemployed workers have cut back their spending on food; more than half also have postponed medical treatment. How welcome a relief would millions of Americans find it, if the President could find the compassion within himself to simply say: Yes, we'll extend unemployment insurance until the economy recovers, and we'll take it up first thing in the New Year?

* * *

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December 29, 2003

Candle in the Wind

By Matt Bivens

Twenty-eight years ago, two electricians at an Alabama nuclear power plant were looking for air leaks in a room full of electric cables, using candles to see where drafts were escaping from. One of the candles got too close to some foam rubber insulation -- and it caught fire. That was the start of the famous Brown's Ferry fire, which roared through the plant, disabling various safety systems including the emergency core cooling system, and in so doing flirted with a meltdown scenario.

After Brown's Ferry, the government's watchdogs put in new fire safety rules. Now, according to the Nuclear Information & Resources Service (or NIRS), the nuclear industry is broadly ignoring those post-Brown's Ferry fire safety rules -- and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is responding by proposing to relax enforcement.

Instead of having proper fire safety measures in place, NIRS says, the NRC is letting utilities get off simply with plans to send reactor employees into the reactor building during a fire to "manually operate" the safety features. (Great plan! I'm sure every employee is going to want to charge back into a burning nuclear reactor building to push buttons and pull levers and such.) Check out this NIRS alert, and also the NRC's web page about fire safety issues, for the details -- including on how to pass on your own comments to government regulators, which can be done through Jan. 26.

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December 22, 2003

Winking at War Crimes

By Matt Bivens

In times like these -- when the President's people are busily scrubbing his office's website to remove all those embarrassing Iraq war bloopers, and generally shutting down the flow of information all across the government -- we should give thanks for dedicated scholars like those at the non-profit National Security Archives.

Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the famous Rumsfeld-Hussein handshake. Donald Rumsfeld had been sent to Baghdad by President Ronald Reagan, bearing gifts of a Bible and a chocolate cake baked in the shape of a key.

Oops, wrong story. Sorry. The cake-and-Bible thing was a few years into the future, and six degrees longitude to the East.

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December 19, 2003

Taking Back America

By Matt Bivens

How long overdue is this? Jose Padilla, the former Chicago gang member the Bush Administration declared an "enemy combatant" two summers ago, has been sitting in a Pentagon-controlled Navy brig in South Carolina -- never charged and never tried, denied a lawyer, denied even a phone call or a chance to talk to any friendly face. He was held like this at the pleasure of an out-of-control President who argues with a straight face that he has the right to cage an American citizen forever on a whim.

Today a federal appeals court ruling handed down in New York restated the obvious: the President is wrong. He cannot simply clap his hands and order the "disappearance" of a US citizen. Which doesn't mean Padilla is free -- only that he is free to enter the mainstream criminal justice system, which has great experience with complex conspiracy cases, and will now tackle the question of whether Padilla truly was involved in planning terrorist activities. The ACLU, which filed its own brief in Jose Padilla v. Donald Rumsfeld, calls today's "a powerful and courageous decision."

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December 18, 2003

The Not-So Long Arm of Saddam

By Matt Bivens

Back when we citizens were struggling to follow the debates over whether to invade Iraq, a comment often heard, often in a half-doubting, half-hopeful tone, was: "They" -- meaning the foreign policy elites in Congress and the White House -- "probably know some things that we don't yet." We assumed that no one would be foolish enough to drag us, half-assed, into a land war in the Middle East. Indeed, the very fact that even as rank-and-file Democrats were saying "no" to war, Congressional Democrats were reluctantly saying "yes", seemed to support the logic that "they" had been told things we hadn't.

Now comes a potential blockbuster of a claim: Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida says the Bush Administration last year told him and about 75 other Senators at a classified briefing that Iraq not only had terrifying weapons, but also a means to deliver them to East Coast cities. Nelson wouldn't say who made that startling behind-closed-doors claim -- though the White House directed questions about it to a tight-lipped Pentagon. But aside from this claim of an Iraqi long-range threat to the East Coast apparently having been totally wrong, it was also far more alarming a claim than was ever put before the public. (It was also a claim likely to have been ripped apart by non-government experts -- was that why it was only whispered in a few Senatorial ears?)

Isn't it time for Senators to speak out frankly about what they were told about Iraq? After all, it sounds like they got a different story than the rest of us.

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December 17, 2003

'We Don't Do Body Counts'

By Matt Bivens

Research by the New York-based Human Rights Watch shows that we could have avoided killing hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians simply "by abandoning two misguided military tactics."

We should not have been dropping cluster bombs on populated areas, a practice HRW says has killed or wounded more than 1,000 civilians. The cluster bombs dropped by US and British forces were just what they sound like: clusters of lots of little bomblets, about 2 million of them, many thousands of which didn't explode immediately and lay around waiting to be set off by a passer-by, a vehicle or a curious child. They are still killing today.

And we should have thought twice about those "decapitation" strikes in which we believed we could pinpoint an Iraqi leader's location to within a 100-meter radius -- a huge swath of area in a civilian neighborhood -- and so simply started blasting away. HRW says that in 50 such cases we did not kill any of our intended targets, only dozens of civilians.

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December 16, 2003

Shootin' Fish in a Barrel

By Matt Bivens

Allow me to indulge in a little preamble. I spent the 1990s as a journalist in Russia, and so one of my favorite things to make fun of over the years has been the hunting habits of Russia's politicians. Boris Yeltsin, for example, in 1996 famously claimed to have bagged 40 ducks in a day -- no doubt he was using an AK-47 with tracer fire. (The word for "duck" in Russian, utka, is also the word for "bedpan", and so Moscow artists lined up 40 bedpans in the President's honor.) A year later, the newspaper I then edited, The St. Petersburg Times, broke the story that because Yeltsin was to come fishing, quaking local officials airlifted in 10,000 extra fish.

Yeltsin was far from unusual in this. The Russian newspaper Argumenty i Fakty once unveiled the KGB scuba divers who used to put fish on Nikita Khrushchev's hooks (a not-uncommon Communist Party practice, according to Arkady Vaksberg's wonderful book, "The Soviet Mafia"). Other officials hiding behind trees used to toss rabbits out for Leonid Brezhnev to bag.

But my favorite-all-time such story was the 1997 bear-hunting trip by Yeltsin's then-prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin: Out in the Russian hinterlands, a local governor heard news of a mother bear and two cubs hibernating inside a tree. So, he ordered a helicopter landing pad established nearby, and a road carved through the woods to the den, so the prime minister could be chauffeured right up to the bear's lair -- at the head of an entourage that included dogs, bodyguards, professional hunters in crisp new uniforms, an ambulance, a kitchen and a mobile dining room -- and gun all three of the bears down. Chernomyrdin was harangued by Russian media about the trip, and came out with an amazing reply: "I was happy that I had an opening in my schedule for this. I love hunting. There is no other recreation that I can afford. I am always short of time."

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December 15, 2003

173 to 1

By Matt Bivens

It was barely noted in the media, but this week the UN General Assembly voted on a series of resolutions on disarmament and security. And as the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy reports, "The United States consistently voted against the most important resolutions on nuclear and space disarmament."

The vote for bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force was 173 yeas against one truculent American nay.

We long ago signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- the treaty we roll up and use to smack the noses of places like Iran when they seek nuclear weapons -- and Article Six of the NPT requires us to work toward eliminating our own nuclear weapons stocks. Yet a Japan-sponsored resolution calling for all states to keep their word on this point was approved with 164 yeas against 2 nays -- with the United States and India opposing.

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December 12, 2003