News from Harper's Magazine
Last updated on HXM DATE
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I missed this when it was published a few days ago. Worth a read. . . .
Hmmm. I wonder how many times this sort of thing happened with stimulus money? And how many millions (billions?) were wasted? . . .
When I last visited Batumi, the Soviet empire was in its final death throes. Nestled around a fine Black Sea harbor, Batumi had every appearance of a place that had seen finer days. It was grimy, dimly lit, and poorly maintained, the handful of turn-of-the-century Mediterranean-style villas being overtaken by disheveled apartment blocks of the Krushchev era. My handlers insisted on a tour of the city’s principal landmark: a decrepit oil refinery, the beacon of Adjara’s entry into the industrial age. The refinery was filthy and in obvious disrepair, boasting technology at least fifty years out of date, and the casual pollution associated with it was appalling, forcing the natives to avoid the oil-stained beachfronts and polluted waters. . . .
Wikileaks released thousands of military field reports from six years of the war in Afghanistan, including several asserting that representatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence met with Taliban leaders to coordinate attacks against American troops and plan assassinations of Afghan leaders, and that the Taliban has been using heat-seeking missiles provided to the mujahideen by the United States during Afghanistan's Soviet occupation. The reports also describe widespread corruption among Afghanistan's military and police. “I asked the seven patrolmen we detained to sit and relax while we sorted through a problem without ever mentioning why they were being detained,” one report reads. “Three of the patrolmen responded by saying that they had only taken money from the truck drivers to buy fuel for their generator.” Another report describes what happened after an Afghan civilian protested the rape by a police commander of a 16-year-old girl. “The district commander ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan civilian],” it says. “The bodyguard refused, at which time the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of the AC.” “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information,” said National Security Adviser General James Jones. “Look,” said a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the reports, “this is nothing new.” New York Times New York Times New York Times At least 45 Afghan civilians were killed in Helmand province when a NATO rocket hit a mud house in which they had taken shelter from fighting between NATO and Taliban forces. New York Times A stampede during the Love Parade, an electronic music festival in Germany, killed eighteen people, and an Arab Israeli was sentenced to 18 months for rape after he slept with a woman under the pretense that he was an eligible Jewish bachelor. New York Times Haaretz Daily . . .
As noted previously, the Justice Department’s criminal probe into the U.S. attorneys scandal ended with a “whimper not a prosecution” last week. The Department informed congressional overseers that, even though the probe found serious wrongdoing by senior Department officials, it was unable to string together the evidence needed to bring criminal charges against any of those involved. Now information has emerged that seriously undermines the reputation of former Connecticut U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy, tapped by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to handle the probe. In a report prepared by the Justice Integrity Project, Harvard University’s Nieman Watchdog reports: . . .
Michelle Singletary couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word — she used the term “” — but her column otherwise nailed the real story. . . .
With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the second in a series of excerpts from the bestselling book Unser Jahrhundert—Ein Gespräch, in an original English translation. . . .
At his SpyTalk blog at the Washington Post, Jeff Stein reports on why the congressional probe into the Manas fuel contracts has been stagnant. It seems that Red Star/Mina Corp., the shadowy London-based companies who are beneficiaries of roughly $1½ billion in Pentagon fuel contracts, were using their overseas registries to avoid complying with congressional queries—ultimately leading the Oversight Committee to issue formal subpoenas and involve the U.S. Marshalls. Now, Stein reports, the congressional investigators have a compliance agreement: . . .
No, not another report from Guantánamo. Ha’aretz reports that an Israeli court has cleared the way for the publication of a hitherto unknown work by the reclusive writer whose works cast such a shadow over the twentieth century. . . .
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama offered a lengthy, detailed critique of the way the Bush Administration had undermined the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “We need more transparency in government,” he argued. He came into office showing signs of acting on his promise. In a memo instructing agencies to treat FOIA requests with a presumption of validity, he wrote: . . .
I don’t think all these Daily Caller stories demonstrate that Journolist was a grand liberal media conspiracy, and almost everyone writes intemperate, sarcastic emails from time to time that would be embarrassing if leaked. Who cares? . . .
The Associated Press reports that the Justice Department’s two-year-long internal criminal probe into the U.S. attorney’s scandal has closed without bringing criminal charges. As usual, the Department waits for the dog days to deliver its report, hoping no one will pay it any attention. . . .
From the New York Times: . . .
From the Washington Post: . . .
From Haaretz: . . .
With the spread of phone cameras and pocket videorecorders, citizens around the United States have taken to recording the conduct of police. Often the conduct seems innocuous enough. But sometimes, the act of recording itself seems to send police off the deep end. ABC News’s Ray Sanchez now reports on a growing trend: police prosecuting citizens for taping them. . . .
The significance of the Shirley Sherrod affair is clear: an employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lost her job and was painted as a racist due to the release of an edited, highly misleading video of a speech she made a quarter-century ago. In any rational world, the headline for a story about the case is pretty obvious: “African American woman fired due to bogus charge of racism; victim smeared by video snippet released by conservative group.” . . .
Strike up the band and bring on Edith Piaf: we now have Jay Bybee’s theme song. The former White House counsel who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and oversaw what is now the most notorious legal memorandum of all time submitted to questioning by the House Judiciary Committee, and a transcript was released late last week. Bybee had avoided making public statements about his role in the issuance of the notorious torture memoranda, but a Washington Post account by Karl Vick appeared on April 25, 2009, quoted friends who said he was not exactly proud of this chapter of his life. Now Bybee corrects the record: . . .
In the midst of a press season focused on moronic political banter (lately including analyses of the twitter feed of a certain former governor), it’s good to see the Washington Post invest substantial talent and resources in a scoping study of the new national-security state. The wealth of data offered in Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s series “Top-Secret America” is impressive, and the even-keel approach that is Dana Priest’s hallmark adds to its credibility. Here are some nuggets that struck me on the first read: . . .
Researchers established that American birth weights are declining, that the babies of Indian child brides are at greater risk for malnutrition, and that sharks born tovirgin mothers—contrary to prior assumptions—sometimes reach adulthood. The saltmarsh sparrow was found to be the world’s most promiscuous bird, and it was discovered that if a mouse is promiscuous, its sperms will sometimes cooperate with one another in order to defeat those of other males. The majority of young Swedish women are attracted to both men and women, and a quarter of British women over the age of 35 never have sex. An American cougar died of the plague. Among wild great tits, relative curiosity is genetically determined, and male tits with brighter plumage have better sperm. Ornithologists reported that flattening the crests or whiskers of auklets made the birds 2.5 times more likely to bump their heads in thedark. . . .
From Mother Jones: . . .
