Off to Old Blighty

My wife and I are off to England for 10 days starting Friday, and packing and preparation are eating up pretty much all available bandwidth. We'll be hitting Nottingham so I can train with Sensei Simon Oliver for a couple of days, but then relaxing and playing tourist in York and then London.

It's Amy's first trip overseas, and I haven't been since 1999. I'm really looking forward to it, although I have to admit to being a little reticent about the possibility of Bush blowback. Here's hoping that the historic race between Obama and Clinton - and the concurrent discrediting and unpopularity of the president - will make for cordial international relations!

Posting at Sensen No Sen will resume in the last week of May. Until then, take care!

Tiny Bits of Ourselves in Permanent Government Custody

Today, as I looked over some of my recent writing, I realized that I've been referencing my own previous posts with greater frequency. I realized also that, while I wish it were because I was able to report the reversal of bad policies, deviations from the viciously self-destructive path the United States has followed since handing the reins to George W. Bush, or even - somewhat fantastically, I know - because earlier complaints about Congress and the president were misguided, none of these is the reason behind this trend. Instead, depressingly, it is a mark of how little things have changed that I find myself providing updates about ongoing and deepening problems rather than calling attention to their resolution.

In the realm of civil liberties and privacy rights, for instance, there are new reports that, in service to the White House, the House Democratic leadership is actively seeking to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and gift the telecommunications industry with retroactive immunity for their illegal eavesdropping on American citizens. Likewise, although the battle over the government's efforts to impose a national identification system via the REAL ID Act remains contested (at least in some places) there are ever more numerouse efforts to take this country down the path toward full surveillance statehood.

Among these efforts is the Justice Department's proposal to implement - as authorized by the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 - the collection of DNA samples from anyone taken into federal law enforcement custody, regardless of whether or not they are convicted of a crime:

This rule directs agencies of the United States that arrest or detain individuals, or that supervise individuals facing charges, to collect DNA samples from individuals who are arrested, facing charges, or convicted, and from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States.

While the potential for abuse is somewhat self-evident in the above excerpt - federal law enforcement could simply round up people (political protestors, are a likely target) - swab their cheeks for DNA and then release them - there are a host of other potential pitfalls with which we should be very concerned.

First and foremost, innocent people do not belong in a database the sole purpose of which is to make them de facto suspects for any and all future crimes. As a recent article in Nature explains:

Although DNA can undoubtedly be useful in exonerating the innocent, a database of individual DNA profiles - as opposed to crime-scene profiles - is never necessary to exonerate an innocent person, because this can always be done by comparing the suspect's DNA profile directly with the DNA profile from the crime scene. The added value of putting individuals' profiles in a database is to introduce new suspects into past or future investigations, not to exonerate the innocent.

At first blush, this might not seem like a big deal, especially when confronted with statements that claim, for instance, that "A Chicago study in 2005 found that 53 murders and rapes could have been prevented if a DNA sample had been collected upon arrest." After all, if there are innocent people in the database, there is no way they can be flagged as a criminal suspect, because DNA profile matching provides astronomically low rates of false positive matching ... Right?

Wrong.

As it turns out, the type of DNA profile matching used in law enforcement today is nowhere near the precise tool that prosecutors, television crime shows and popular wisdom would have us believe. Because, while it is possible to ascertain that two samples of DNA did not originate from a single person - e.g. testing samples to prove a suspect is not guilty of a crime - the level of precision necessary to determine conclusively that two samples came from the same person does not exist. Accuracy varies wildly based on a number of factors, and the larger the reference database, the higher the odds are that people will be implicated in crimes of which they are innocent because of false positive matches. (See this Los Angles Times article - also linked in the next paragraph - for a fuller explanation of the last statement.)

Recently, for example, a man in L.A. was convicted of murder because his DNA - which had been stored after previous arrests - was apparently matched to that of the killer in a 30-year-old, unsolved slaying. While prosecutors told the jury that the odds of a false match in this case were greater than 1.1 million to 1, because of degradation in the original DNA sample - as well statistical considerations involving the use of California's DNA database - the actual odds of an inaccurate match were as a high as one in three.

Further, implementing a sweeping collection process for DNA would - like the requirements for REAL ID - be wholly impractical. The proposed Justice Department regulation estimates that roughly one million new samples would be collected annually, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) currently processes only about 75,000 samples each year - a sure recipe for massive backlogs and the consequent errors that have plagued other, overloaded DNA matching efforts. One possible solution would be to outsource such a program to the private sector - something the DNA Fingerprint Act openly contemplates - but the potential for abuse, including "shadow databases," of this kind of deeply personal data in such circumstances is hard to deny.

DNA, after all, despite the name of the legislation in question, is not just a fingerprint; it houses highly sensitive medical information. While the use of said information to deny health insurance or disqualify people from certain kinds of employment is currently prohibited, the fact of the matter is that the actual samples used to extract DNA profiles - not just the profiles themselves - would be held in perpetuity. Given the creeping intrusiveness we have seen during the presidency of George W. Bush, it is only a naive or foolish citizen who believes those little bits of themselves in permanent government custody would be in any way sacrosanct.

Given the controversial nature of the proposed DNA collection procedures, one might reasonably wonder why it hasn't been a hot topic of discussion; why this issue wasn't front page news when it was debated in the halls of Capitol Hill. There is an easy answer: it was never debated and no votes were cast for it or against it. Instead, Senator John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, attached the DNA Finger Print Act to the reauthorization bill for the popular (and otherwise commendable) Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This bill, complete with its DNA collection amendment, passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and was signed into law by the president on January 5, 2006.

And now - as with so many things in George W. Bush's America - we have to deal with the very real and very serious effects of this short-sightedness, arrogance and hypocrisy.

Like I wrote at the beginning, not much has changed.

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TAKE ACTION:

If you'd like to make your voice heard on the implementation of this legislation, use this link to go to Regulations.gov and add your public comment. Comments can be made on this topic until May 19th.

If You Liked George, You're Going To Love John

[Image courtesy of 2MillionthWeblog.]

Last July, I wrote a post entitled The Inexplicable Charisma of Fred Thompson, in which I noted the following:

The cognitive dissonance embodied in John McCain's spiraling campaign, meanwhile, is awful to behold. He squandered the straight-talking, maverick image he carefully cultivated after being tagged as one of the Keating Five, and hitched his wagon to the wrong horse, toadying for President Bush when W was at his zenith and irreversibly associating himself with both the Iraq War and the man who is likely to go down as the worst president in history. Worse, with the memories of what Bush did to him in the 2000 election in the back of his mind, he couldn't pull it off without looking like he was trying desperately to choke down a bucketful of foulness and evil. He knows he sold his soul at a tragic discount, but while it's possible to be sympathetic towards him on some level, that doesn't make him any less worthy of derision.

While it was unquestionably premature for me to declare Senator McCain's campaign to be in a death spriral, recent polling indicates that I was pretty much right on the money with regard to American perceptions of the Arizona legislator's links to President Bush; fully 43 percent of voters say they are concerned that he is too closely aligned with the current adminsitration. (As it turns out, with the ludicrous policy proposals sputtering forth from Camp McCain - apparently based on equal parts hand-waving, smoke, mirrors and pandering - I was also right about the derision part.)

In any case, the press has been doing just about everything it can to resuscitate Mr. McCain's maverick straight-talker image and keep his campaign reasonably appealing to a nation justifiably beaten down by two terms of George Walker Bush. As I described in Holding the Media Accountable:

To date, for instance, Senator McCain has enjoyed coverage that is difficult to describe as anything other than "extremely friendly." He is routinely portrayed as a straight-talking maverick foreign policy expert with a reputation seemingly unassailable, no matter how many times he misstates the relationship of Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda to Shi'ite Muslim Iran or makes claims about the economy that are demonstrably untrue ... The fact that Mr. McCain divorced his first wife after she suffered serious injury in a car accident in order to marry his current, extremely wealthy spouse - with whom he had been carrying on an extramarital affair - or that he was at the very center of the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal hasn't seemed to matter. While new developments about Senator McCain's apparent influence peddling continue to be unearthed, Senator Obama in particular has had to deal with insipid "issues" like his bowling score and use of the word "bitter" to describe some voters in Pennsylvania.

Make no mistake; the media is without a doubt as big a political force in the 2008 presidential elections as any of the candidates, and not in a good way.

So, how to cut through all of the misinformation, sins of omission and soft-headed press-created narratives clouding the facts and warping the political process? For those inclined to follow the continuing devolution of Senator McCain on an ongoing basis, I recommend Think Progress' McCain tracking page for a good, cumulative review. For those who want the thumbnail version, go ahead and take the Bush-McCain Challenge; its 5 questions amply illustrate how out of touch with the country the presumptive Republican nominee actually is, and how extreme his positions really are. Whichever you choose, however, it will be pretty difficult to draw a conclusion other than that if you liked George, you're going to love John.

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Five Years Closer to Collapse

Today, five years after President Bush paraded in a flight suit on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," comes news that an Army ranger was killed Tuesday in Afghanistan during his seventh tour of duty. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino - who has apparently had her capacity for perceiving irony surgically removed (the same cannot be said for her ability to compose statements of singular, self-centered crassness) - declared that the administration had "paid a price for not being more specific" in the messaging of the "Mission Accomplished" banner that hung behind the president as he trumpeted false claims of victory in Iraq. Missing from Ms. Perino's comments was an explanation of how anyone could be required to serve seven tours of duty if major combat operations were over.

Of course, this attitude is nothing new for Mr. Bush and the people who work to keep him in power. As I have written in earlier posts, the president's "War on Terror" has been one defined by classism, hypocritical politicization of the armed forces, and perhaps most importantly, serial abuse of the military:

Now, not only is the United States stretched too thin to address another significant crisis, current policies are ensuring that, even when our troops are finally brought home from Iraq, the military will be exhausted, substandard and suffering from poor morale. The White House's desire to fight the Iraq War on the cheap and with as little political cost as possible is coming home to roost. Like nearly everything else the Bush Administration has touched, the military will bear the scars of ignorant, ideological, and short-sighted policies for years to come.

Despite statements by leading veterans like Colin Powell that the military is "broken," as well as vivid and public black marks like the Walter Reed scandal, evidence continues to mount that the White House and the modern Republican Party are conducting what appears to be an almost conscious effort to thoroughly undermine the armed forces and the families of those serving in them.

Earlier this month, for instance, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released data on the number of felons allowed to enlist in the Army and the Marines. Hard-pressed over the past several years to make recruiting goals, these services have increasingly opened their ranks to men and women with serious criminal records, and as Chairman Henry Waxman noted, "Concerns have been raised that the significant increase in the recruitment of persons with criminal records is a result of the strain put on the military by the Iraq war and may be undermining military readiness." It is a mark of our utterly misplaced priorities that homosexuals are expelled from active service simply for being gay while the number of felons admitted into the Army jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 a year later.

In the same vein, a bill authored by Senator Jim Webb that originally enjoyed broad bipartisan support - and which would dramatically increase the educational benefits for troops serving in the military - has now gained substantial opposition from the White House, presumptive G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, and Republican legislators. Despite the success of previous incarnations of the G.I. Bill and similar legislation, that saw - for example - Mr. Webb, a Marine veteran, attend law school at taxpayer expense in return for his service in Vietnam, those opposed to this effort to improve the lives of veterans say they are worried that richer educational benefits will diminish the number of career military personnel. In the face of a petition with 30,000 signatures from veterans supporting Senator Webb's bill, Senator McCain has mouthed talking points about bureaucracy and rules:

“There are fundamental differences,” McCain told Politico. “He creates a new bureaucracy and new rules. His bill offers the same benefits whether you stay three years or longer. We want to have a sliding scale to increase retention. I haven’t been in Washington, but my staff there said that his has not been eager to negotiate.”

“He’s so full of it,” Webb said in response. “I have personally talked to John three times. I made a personal call to [McCain aide] Mark Salter months ago asking that they look at this.”

“Hell, no,” Webb bristled when asked if there had been an implicit message that he would attack McCain if he didn’t come on board. "John McCain has been a longtime friend of mine, and I think if John sat down and examined what was in this bill, he would co-sponsor it,” Webb said. “I don’t want this to become a political issue. I want to get a bill done.”

Finally, there is complete disgrace that is the Veterans Administration (V.A.) director for mental health services, Ira Katz. As reported by the Associated Press:

An eMail message from Katz disclosed this week as part of a lawsuit that went to trial in San Francisco starts with "Shh!" and claims 12,000 veterans a year attempt suicide while under department treatment.

"Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the eMail asks.

Six months ago, CBS News reported on what they termed a Suicide Epidemic Among Veterans, and in that story, Dr. Katz declared that the V.A. is "determined to decrease veteran suicides." Apparently, however, the Veterans Administration Mental Health Group has been more determined to hide the problem than to actually address it, because the group's own eMails admit than 18 veterans kill themselves each day, and five of them are under V.A. care when they do so.

To make matters worse, rather than address the underlying issues, the Bush Administration, as defendants in the San Francisco case, have argued that veterans groups do not have legal standing to bring suit. And to top that off, the V.A. has maintained that medical treatment for combat veterans is not guaranteed, but discretionary, based on the level of funding available in the V.A.’s budget. It's difficult to believe that anyone enlisting to serve their country would ever expect to be treated like this [emphasis mine]:

Multiple times during his opening statement, Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley categorized the veterans’ groups as “special interests” and argued the changes they seek in their lawsuit - better and faster mental health care, and more rights for veterans appealing denials of benefits - are beyond the judge’s authority.

In March 2007, I wrote a post entitled Serially Abusing the American Military, and noted:

It is hard to come to any conclusion but that our soldiers are being serially abused. Consider for a moment the (by no means exhaustive) list of factors that are presently assaulting the structural integrity of - and the individuals in - our armed forces:

• Stop loss
• Insufficient equipment
• An undefined, long-term mission
• Cuts in benefits
• Inadequate veterans facilities
• Inadequate outpatient services
• Inadequate psychological services
• An unprecedented suicide rate
• Diminished standards for enlistment
• Deployment of medically unfit personnel

More than twelve months after I wrote those words, the only things that have changed are that the list above should certainly include institutionalized callousness, and that more military men and women are dead, both in combat, and by their own hand. Five years after his costumed performance aboard the Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Bush's war is no closer to over than it was then. Our military, however, is five years closer to collapse.

Pulling Away the Veil of Euphemism

In Gitmo's Not Going Anywhere, I wrote about the reasons that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp remains operational, despite near-universal condemnation. Because the impact of "stress positions" on the people forced to endure them is greatly reduced when their description is only verbal, I also posted a video from Amnesty International's Unsubscribe Me campaign that depicted visually just how brutal "being forced into an uncomfortable posture" actually is.

Now, with recent confirmation that United States torture policy was not only formulated but actively managed at the highest levels of the executive branch and approved by President Bush, Unsubscribe Me has done for waterboarding what they did for stress positions. Watch it below, and if you don't believe waterboarding - which the C.I.A. has admitted using - is torture afterwards, read this article by a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) School. It is time to pull down the veil of euphemism that brands what is shown in the video as "harsh interrogation techniques" rather than what it is: torture by Americans.

Holding the Media Accountable

Tuesday's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania did not determine whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will claim their party's nomination. When a clear winner does finally emerge - and in all likelihood it will not be until the convention in August - one of the more interesting (and potentially frustrating) questions will be what kind of press coverage the presidential contest receives in the run-up to November. Current reporting is largely dominated by Senators Clinton and Obama, but as journalists move to compare the Democratic and Republican nominees, early indications are that the quality of said reporting is in serious doubt unless the public keeps pressure on the media to both exhibit an even hand and focus on the issues that matter.

To date, for instance, Senator McCain has enjoyed coverage that is difficult to describe as anything other than "extremely friendly." He is routinely portrayed as a straight-talking maverick foreign policy expert with a reputation seemingly unassailable, no matter how many times he misstates the relationship of Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda to Shi'ite Muslim Iran or makes claims about the economy that are demonstrably untrue (see video below). The fact that Mr. McCain divorced his first wife after she suffered serious injury in a car accident in order to marry his current, extremely wealthy spouse - with whom he had been carrying on an extramarital affair - or that he was at the very center of the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal hasn't seemed to matter. While new developments about Senator McCain's apparent influence peddling continue to be unearthed, Senator Obama in particular has had to deal with insipid "issues" like his bowling score and use of the word "bitter" to describe some voters in Pennsylvania.

Likewise, the Arizona senator's pandering to religious extremists John Hagee and Jerry Falwell goes unchallenged - as does the fact that his supposed anti-lobbyist stance is clearly at odds with both past actions and the staffing of his campaign - but his counterpart from Illinois has been forced to repeatedly address a relationship with firebrand preacher Jeremiah Wright (who is, by the way, a former Marine) and the fact that he has met ex-Weather Underground bomber William Ayers a couple of times in passing. Mr. McCain's longstanding, cozy relationship with the press establishment - extending even to a barbecue for reporters at his house that clearly swayed stories about him - has to date been unshakeable.

Even with a tradition of tabloid coverage that saw 2004 candidate John Kerry mocked for windsurfing and 2000 contender Al Gore falsely smeared as a serial exaggerator who claimed to have invented the internet, the degree to which Democrats have been peppered during this election cycle with nonsense "gotchas" like Sniperfiregate and Lapelpingate and other infuriating wastes of journalistic energy has been exceptional. Nothing better exemplifies the press's obsession with the trivial and the meaningless than ABC News' widely derided presidential debate last week, in which no policy issues at all were discussed during the first 53 minutes of what became a two-hour tribute to the lowest common denominator. But with close to 20,000 comments on its debate blog page excoriating the network for this abysmal performance, as well as more than one open letter to the moderators, there are mildly encouraging signs that the public is both more aware and increasingly intolerant of bias and substandard coverage.

While there are certainly things about which to criticize Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, the presence or absence of American flag pins on a candidate's lapel (Mr. McCain is often seen without one as well, but that fact has yet to be made controversial) clearly falls into the realm of the absurd. Likewise, Senator McCain might grill a mean rack of ribs, but the fact that his proposed tax plan would result in even more massive deficits than under President Bush; that, as a life-long recipient of government insurance, he has shown himself to be woefully out of touch with the health care concerns of most Americans; or that there is substantial evidence that he is tempermentally unsuited for the presidency, should be kept in mind - along with everything else mentioned above - whenever encountering stories about the "straight-talking maverick" from Arizona. Now more than ever, it is incredibly clear that the press cannot be taken at face value, and that single-sourcing of one's election year political information is a recipe for disaster.

What remains to be seen is whether, once the run for the White House is whittled down to two candidates, mainstream media outlets will respond to market demand, or continue the outright collusion with the current rightwing power structure that began with Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush. Although past performance cannot reliably forecast future results, it is the only remotely predictive input available to us, and unfortunately, it strongly suggests continued imbalance in the coverage that will be "enjoyed" by the eventual nominees. With that in mind, it will be more important than ever to be vigilant in holding news outlets accountable for the way they report (or fail to report) on important issues, and it will be even more crucial for Americans - who have a very spotty history in this regard - to actively seek out and learn what they need to know.

Who can tell? Maybe the country has been beaten down and pushed around enough in the last eight years to make it happen. One can only hope...

Busy, Busy, Busy

Just a quick note to say that posting will be on the shorter side this week, as I have a full plate at work and some traveling to do on Friday. More to come...