The recent California federal district court ruling that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping violated a 1978 surveillance law was the first significant judicial rebuke to post-9/11 government eavesdropping. For that reason alone, Judge Vaughn Walker's damages award to the Muslim charity Al-Haramain and its attorneys, targets of unlawful spying in 2004, is worthy of celebration. But the ruling won't change our current deeply troubling surveillance regime. In that sense, it is a timely reminder of unfinished business.
Ever since Barack Obama took office, accountability for rights violations during the "war on terror" has been thin. Victims of wrongful overseas detention, surveillance and torture have received no apology and no reparations. Despite an early commitment to close Guantánamo, 183 prisoners remain there. Indeed, Obama has released fewer detainees than Bush did during his last year in office. And despite an early promise to protect the First Amendment rights of Muslim charities, Obama has done nothing to change the onerous application of terrorism financing laws. Walker's decision is only the second to have ruled against the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. All other challenges--including one against the odious 2008 FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which The Nation has joined as a plaintiff--ultimately got booted at the courthouse door.
Even if Walker's opinion survives possible appeal, it will have no effect on the broad surveillance powers unleashed by the FAA, which passed with then-Senator Obama's support. Under that law, the government can dispense with individualized warrants, the cornerstone of Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Absent meaningful judicial review, we simply can't know how much surveillance the government is carrying out.
Continuity, not change, has characterized the conduct of Eric Holder's Justice Department. Walker documents, in his opinion, the government's persistent "refusal to cooperate with the court's orders," its improper use of procedural delays and even point-blank refusals to produce information. Yes, this was business as usual during the Bush era. But Walker was talking about events on Obama's watch.
Nor is Walker's experience unusual. In lawsuits by survivors of the CIA's "black sites" and Guantánamo's interrogation rooms, the government either keeps insisting that "state secrets" require outright dismissal or has stuck to the canard that noncitizens forcibly brought into US custody overseas lack all constitutional rights. In Guantánamo litigation, habeas lawyers complain about obfuscation, secrecy and delay not dissimilar from what they faced in the Bush era.
Blaming the lawyers is easy. But it is the otherwise near-absolute absence of accountability that makes Walker's opinion such a lonely beacon. This absence is, in large part, a result of the Obama administration's failure to explain to the American people that the surveillance program violated the Constitution, and that unlawful and futile torture was rife in Guantánamo and the black sites.
It is not too late to win the political, or the moral, battle. It is not too late to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to explain that reckless and illegal incursions into privacy rights are no road to security. It is only by taking on that battle that the Obama administration, and not just a handful of voices on the federal bench, can produce the real change its lawyers have been fighting.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Soft on terrorism: NYPD to fight spiking crime rates by reassigning counterterror cops to street patrols in tough neighborhoods . . . What we're not fretting about this week: "When the enemy's best recent shot involves lighting his pants on fire [don't sweat] nightmarish visions of WMDs," maven maintains . . . Dead End Gals: Liverpool airport securers arrest two women trying wheel an already deceased family member on board. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
Close air support: The FBI and F-16s responded to Denver International after a passenger was acting oddly on a United Airlines flight from Washington, 9Newsnotes — and see AP as to whether a Qatari diplomat really tried to set fire to his shoes.Techies who swooped on Apple’s new iPad are thrilled to discover that TSA apparently won’t make them pull the devices out of their bags at checkpoints, Forbes finds out. Muslim and Sikh groups praised TSA for rolling back screening rules on passengers arriving from 14 primarily Islamic countries, even as some worry that profiling will continue, The Religious News Service notes. Liverpool airport security arrested two German women trying to wheel an already deceased family member onto an easyJet flight to Berlin, which Jaunted deems “a first.”
Coming and going: “In a world beset by the possibilities of terrorism, for flights that are anything less than trans-Atlantic many travelers will do anything they can to avoid airports,” a San Gabriel Valley (Calif.) Tribune editorial on high-speed rail observes. Travel insurance “doesn’t cover you if you are concerned about terrorist bombings on the plane, train, or bus” and, if it does “it may be limited to the exact city of your itinerary and to a specific time frame,” Gather tutors. Since 1995 there have been 250 attacks on passenger rail systems worldwide, resulting in 900 deaths and more than 6,000 injuries, Government Executive spotlights — and check LiveScience.com’s “What Were the Worst Subway Attacks in History.” Cutting Edge News, finally, complains that DHS’s February quadrennial review “mentioned subways only once in more than 100 pages.”
Crime and punishment: The second woman in the “Jihad Jane” case yesterday shook her head to indicate a not guilty plea, rather than speak at a brief Philadelphia court hearing, The Inquirer informs. A Texas man who tried to firebomb a Pasadena condominium development was sentenced this week to five years in a federal slammer, the Los Angeles Times relays. Some prisoners held in the Bureau of Prison’s harsh “Communications Management Units” protest being designated as “terrorists” by Justice, despite never having been convicted of any terror-related crime, Inter Press Service says — while Politico sees the administration releasing new rules for maximum-security detention of terror convicts identical to those its predecessor proposed in 2006 and then abandoned.
Holy Wars: Muslims aren’t alone in seeing a double standard in how terrorism is linked to Islam but not often to Christianity or other religions, RNS, again, explores — as Al Jazeera finds CAIR asking the FBI for intel on militia groups’ threat to American Muslims. When leading Islamic scholars convened in Turkey last weekend to debate the 14th-century text undergirding today’s jihadism, top religious leaders were notably absent, while “many locals viewed the conference with suspicion before it even began,” Hurriyet reports. Forty pages of captured Web chat offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah al Qaeda affiliate, suggesting more international links than previously assumed, AP reports. “Inspired by 18th century American revolutionists, today’s Tea Partiers have gotten the nation’s attention. Can they foment their own revolution?” AP explores, answering: “Not yet.”
Blood libel: “Boston’s Liberty Tree, the towering elm that stands on the very spot where the original provided shade and a meeting place for patriots in the lead-up to the American Revolution, has been in very poor health of late,” Ridiculopathy laboriously parodies. “The symptoms are plain to see: withered roots, drooping limbs, and even an embarrassing case of bark rot. According to a spokesperson from the National Parks Service, the tree has been poisoned with what appears to be medical waste. Someone, it seems, has been feeding it blood on a regular basis. Earlier this week an anonymous tipster phoned officials to say that . . . he or she had been strongly encouraged to do it after listening to a recent local talk radio show. Here’s the weird part: This was not a call-in gardening program meant to answer people’s questions about this sort of thing. It was a political show dedicated to anti-government rants of one sort and another. What the host was doing offering any tree-related advice, especially advice this far off base, is anyone’s guess.”
Editor's Note: The mine explosion in West Virginia on April 5 is the worst since a 1984 accident at Wilberg, Utah. As a union safety expert, Joe Main was on the scene then; he's now the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor, which under Hilda Solis is taking a tough stand on labor law violations.
In 1984, on the Wasatch Plateau in southern Utah, the Wilberg coal mine, a property of Emery Mining, exploded into flames. Witnesses described plumes of dark gray smoke billowing up into the heavens. Twenty-seven coal miners were trapped inside. By the following night it was clear none of them would make it out alive. "If hell existed," the Salt Lake Tribune reported, "it was down in the Wilberg mine."
David Lauriski was Emery's chief safety officer when Wilberg caught fire, an accident later attributed to numerous violations at the mine. The owners, it turned out, had been trying for a one-day production record. Seventeen years after the disaster, Lauriski became George W. Bush's first mine safety chief, a perch from which he halted a dozen new safety regulations initiated under Clinton, advocating instead a more "collaborative" approach with industry. His successor was also from private industry; during a stint as a state regulator, his lax enforcement played a role in another mining disaster, this one at the Quecreek Mine in Pennsylvania.
Now, for the first time in its history, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), a division of the Department of Labor (DoL), is headed by a union man, Joe Main. Main began his working life as a teenager in 1967, doing the precarious work of sinking a coal mine shaft in West Virginia. By 19 he was a mine safety committeeman, later joining the United Mine Workers' health and safety department, where he worked for decades. He was working for the union at the time of the Wilberg fire and rushed to the scene. He recalls spending four or five days there during the grueling rescue and recovery operation. "It took us a year to recover the last miner," he recalls, "and I dealt with the families a lot during that time. It's something that's stayed with me my whole life." Main was confirmed by the Senate in late October; six weeks later he launched a major national initiative to end black lung disease.
During the Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse. But since California Congresswoman Hilda Solis became labor secretary last winter, she has brought on board a team of lifelong advocates for working people--some of whom come from the ranks of organized labor--and has hired hundreds of new investigators and enforcers.
President Obama calls Solis part of his economic team, but the truth is she's not part of the daily huddle at the White House with Summers and Geithner and Orszag. She's tapped instead as a lead voice in the "jobs, jobs, jobs" choir, advocating for Obama's latest stimulus package. She has tiptoed into the realm of financial regulation, organizing a joint hearing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the abysmal performance of target date retirement funds during the market crash, and she doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in job training funds, a decent chunk of which she has used to shape policy by channeling it to green industries. But Solis understands that her real influence lies in her power to enforce the nation's labor laws--the primary mission of the DoL. It's a role she embraced with relish at her swearing-in, where she announced with a grin, "To those who have for too long abused workers, put them in harm's way, denied them fair pay, let me be clear: there is a new sheriff in town."
Indeed, Solis threw her weight around on Capitol Hill when one key deputy, Labor Solicitor Patricia Smith, faced stiff opposition from business lobbies and the GOP. One of Smith's predecessors as labor solicitor--the nation's top enforcer of labor laws--was Eugene Scalia, son of the Supreme Court justice. Scalia's previous claim to fame was his successful campaign to block an ergonomics safety standard, using an industry-supported Astroturf group to question whether repetitive-motion injuries exist at all. As labor solicitor, he invoked the Taft-Hartley Act against West Coast longshoremen locked out by their employer (a former client) and made a habit of undermining his own agency, writing a brief supporting limits on whistleblower protections. After a one-year tour, he landed on the lush payroll of Gibson Dunn, a leading "union avoidance" firm, where he now serves as an expert on "downsizing" when not penning attacks on the Employee Free Choice Act for the Wall Street Journal.
Smith, on the other hand, has spent more than twenty years going to battle on behalf of vulnerable, low-wage workers, first at the New York State attorney general's office and then as the state's labor commissioner. "She turned it from a backwater agency to a national model in just three years," says Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. "In my career I've never seen an agency turned around so quickly." What Smith did in New York, according to labor officials, community advocates and business leaders, was to take a targeted approach not just to rogue players but to rogue industries, such as retail, residential construction and restaurants, where minimum-wage and safety violations were rampant.
She did high-profile investigations and carefully orchestrated surprise inspections, conducted special outreach to immigrant workers, and used the full arsenal of penalties, including criminal charges, to send a message to employers. Deborah Axt, legal director of Make the Road, a New York City community organization, recalls Smith doing a sweep of retail outlets in Bushwick, where investigators uncovered $200,000 in back wages owed at nineteen businesses on a single commercial strip. According to Axt, Smith was a master at leveraging her limited resources for maximum impact; her department quickly became a national model for community partnerships. And she did all this while maintaining warm relations with New York's business community. Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business association, was so impressed by Smith's quick response to the tens of thousands of Wall Street layoffs in late 2008 that she wrote a letter to the Senate in support of Smith's nomination.
After Senate Republican Mike Enzi put a hold on her nomination for months, Smith was finally confirmed on February 4.
Or take OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Bush's final OSHA director was Edwin Foulke, a former partner at Jackson Lewis, another large unionbusting law firm, who was such a fan of voluntary compliance over enforcement that the New York Times called him an "antiregulatory ideologue." Shortly after joining OSHA in 2005, he began delivering a PowerPoint lecture, "Adults Do the Darndest Things," featuring images of workers near live power lines or on improper scaffolding, which he played for laughs.
Now, under the leadership of David Michaels and his deputy, Jordan Barab, OSHA's second-floor conference room features photographs of workers killed on the job. Staffers meet under the wide grin of Tyler Kahle, in his orange safety vest, who was crushed by a lift at 19, and the shy gaze of Erin Sperrey, who was beaten to death at 20 while working the night shift at a Tim Horton's. Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University, is a lifelong expert on occupational health--he helped to found the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) in the 1970s--and on industry's use of fake science to undermine government regulations, the subject of his 2008 book, Doubt Is Their Product. In it, he is harshly critical of Bush's OSHA, writing that industry "alliances" and other forms of voluntary compliance "replaced any effort to strengthen weak standards and improve inspections." He writes witheringly of OSHA's handling of popcorn lung, once an extremely rare disease, which exploded in 2000 among workers exposed to diacetyl, used in buttery flavorings. The lungs of afflicted workers corroded so quickly, it was as if they had inhaled acid. Only now is OSHA finally developing a health standard on the safe use of diacetyl.
In early March, Michaels presided over a daylong forum called "OSHA Listens." At that event, industry was well represented, and Michaels gave prominent spots to speakers from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, who complained that the department was "trying to scare employers by touting its enforcement agenda." But it was no accident that he scheduled them immediately after a panel of grieving women who broke down as they spoke about their husbands or sons or uncles dying in factory explosions, burns and falls.
Other tested activists are scattered throughout the department: Mary Beth Maxwell, a leader in the fight for labor law reform as head of American Rights at Work, was brought on as a senior adviser to Solis. Deborah Berkowitz, OSHA's new chief of staff, was health and safety director for the United Food and Commercial Workers. And Main's deputy for policy at MSHA, Greg Wagner, is a doctor who spent more than a decade treating miners with respiratory illnesses at a West Virginia clinic. "It's fair to say," says AFL-CIO legislative director Bill Samuel, "that some of the president's best appointments have been at the Department of Labor."
Yes, capital may reign at Government Sachs, where the shrunken paychecks of working people are tithed to subsidize the very Wall Street institutions that forced the country into recession. But in one forgotten corner of the administration, over on C Street and Constitution, at a department whose entire $1.5 billion enforcement budget couldn't pay for a single B-2 bomber, Solis has formed a rump group that's fighting on the right side of the class war.
Solis and her able deputies have inherited a Department of Labor in tatters. By the time they arrived in Washington, health and safety compliance had become all but voluntary, as had minimum wage and overtime pay. Within two months of taking office, Bush and his labor secretary, Elaine Chao, had rammed through Congress the repeal of a new ergonomics regulation that had been a decade in the making. "It was almost like PATCO [the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization] in terms of its symbolic importance," says NYCOSH director Joel Shufro, referring to Ronald Reagan's crushing of the union in 1981. "That sent employers a huge message." After that, the DoL didn't issue a single new regulation unless it was forced to by Congress or the courts. Chao not only imposed new restrictions on overtime pay; she produced guidance for employers on how to avoid paying it. She imposed onerous reporting requirements that applied only to labor unions. And she left behind a layer of like-minded middle managers who, AFGE Local 12 vice president Eleanor Lauderdale says, have yet to be replaced. (The new OSHA leadership recently fired a Bush-era dissident manager, Bob Whitmore, who'd been on administrative leave since 2007 for blowing the whistle on shoddy industry reporting.)
"It was eight years of neglect," says Samuel. "These were not people who believed in many of the statutes they were hired to enforce."
Facing badly depleted enforcement ranks, Solis hired 710 additional enforcement staff, including 130 at OSHA and 250 for the crucial wage-and-hour division, upping inspectors by more than a third. Another hundred will come on next year to staff a crackdown on the misclassification of millions of employees as "independent contractors"--a dodge to avoid paying taxes and benefits--a move that has set off enormous buzz on business blogs. Her team took a plunger to the stagnant regulatory pipeline, moving forward new rules on coal mine dust, silica, and cranes and derricks. She restored prevailing wages for agricultural guest workers and is poised to restore reporting rules on ergonomic injuries. She revoked Chao's union reporting requirements and countered with a proposed rule that employers who hire union avoidance firms must publicly report it, the sort of sunshine that could easily act as a deterrent. This latter measure hints at the sort of creative tactics being explored at the DoL, even as prounion legislation is stymied in Congress.
The real question, of course, is whether Solis and her dream team can do more than simply get DoL's engine humming again. To have a real impact on workers' rights, the department, despite its still token number of inspectors (it would take nearly 140 years for OSHA to visit every workplace in America) and the government's laborious rulemaking process, will have to tackle daunting tasks: tens of thousands of unregulated, potentially toxic chemicals; rampant wage theft; and an epidemic of ergonomic injuries.
Take wage theft. A recent large-scale study of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, the country's three largest cities, found that one in four (some 400,000 workers) is paid less than minimum wage; among those who work late, 76 percent are stiffed for the extra hours. This is corporate lawbreaking on a mind-boggling scale. How do a few hundred inspectors tackle that? Or look at the challenge of genuinely regulating toxic exposures: there are some 80,000 chemicals in use by American industry, which trigger hundreds of thousands of illnesses each year, yet OSHA has set exposure limits for fewer than 500, most of which are based on out-of-date science from the 1940s and '50s. Where to start? Or ergonomics. Lifting, twisting and repetitive motion stresses are the leading cause of workplace injuries, forcing a million Americans to lose time from work each year. Thousands of poultry workers are permanently crippled by carpal tunnel syndrome, while half of all nurses suffer chronic back pain, forcing many, at a time of acute nursing shortages, to leave the profession. And yet when Congress killed OSHA's ergonomic regulation in 2001, it also barred OSHA from writing a new one that was similar. How to escape that bind?
What's so striking about the new team at DoL is, just weeks or months on the job, they're already asking these big strategic questions.
At MSHA, Main has not only come out swinging on black lung; he's launched a big-picture safety campaign he calls Rules to Live By, which involves combing through the data to identify the top causes of miner deaths. First, Main says, he'll educate mining companies about the need to eliminate these risk factors; next will come "increased enforcement," with special attention to "serious" violations, which trigger the largest fines. For Main, there's a direct correlation between hefty fines and fewer deaths. "We'll provide assistance to the mine operators who do need it," he says, "but never as a replacement to the enforcement tools. There was some confusion about that in recent years. I'm not confused about that."
Even before Michaels was confirmed at OSHA, his deputy, Jordan Barab, a widely respected expert who once ran health and safety for the public sector union AFSCME, cracked down on Nevada's state program, which had looked the other way as fatal construction accidents surged on the Las Vegas strip. Barab also issued the largest fine in the history of the agency by a factor of four--$87 million against BP Products, for failing to remedy hazards that led to a massive explosion at a Texas oil refinery, which left fifteen dead and 170 injured. At "OSHA Listens," Michaels discussed coping with his tiny enforcement staff by requiring every workplace in America to have a plan in place to identify its own unique hazards and prevent them. As for chemical exposure, he told The Nation that "we can't proceed on the chemical-by-chemical path" and that he is coordinating with federal scientific agencies to develop a more ambitious approach. He also said he'd immediately start issuing ergonomics citations, rule or no rule, using OSHA's broad, but extremely underutilized, "general duty clause."
Even before being confirmed, Smith was credited with sparking the national enforcement drive against businesses that misclassify employees as contractors because of her success cracking down on such scofflaws in New York--a brilliant enforcement priority at a time of budget deficits, with the potential to bring in billions of dollars in unpaid taxes, unemployment insurance and Social Security payments. But she's known especially for her insight that, as Retail union organizer Jeff Eichler, who worked closely with Smith in New York, says, "to impact an entire sector had to involve working with groups outside the bureau." She used labor unions, churches and immigrant groups as her eyes and ears on the ground; they organized plaintiffs, served as liaisons with state investigators and translated big enforcement fines into long-term gains for workers by means of union contracts or sector-wide employer manuals.
In fact, it was these efforts to use community groups as a force multiplier that triggered a furious campaign by business front groups to block her nomination. Senator Enzi obtained reams of e-mails to produce an alarmist forty-page report about one small pilot program Smith had launched, Wage Watch, which trained community members to report wage violations. Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Limited Government piled on, the latter issuing an alert that if her concept went national, "it could turn tens of thousands of 'community organizers' into raving vigilantes."
Nonetheless, at the new DoL, community partnerships are fast becoming standard operating procedure. Phil Tom, a leader with Chicago's Interfaith Worker Justice, was appointed head of the department's Office for Faith Based and Community Initiatives, which until recently was little more than a feeding trough for politically connected evangelicals. He's expected to use the office to engage the religious community on workers' rights. Likewise, OSHA is tapping labor and immigration groups to expand its enforcement reach. The agency is sponsoring a major Spanish-language conference on Latino workers' rights in April in Texas and joined local workers' rights organizations to plan a summit in Nebraska in March on safety violations in meatpacking.
Most of the DoL's new investigators are now on board, and they'll soon be in the field handing out citations. Severe GAO reports in the past two years on the failure to enforce at the wage and hour division and the undercounting of injuries at OSHA will provide political cover as these teams step up enforcement. But they are still working with antiquated tools. OSHA threw the book at Wal-Mart last May, several months after a Long Island worker was trampled to death on Black Friday--and yet the maximum fine was $7,000, pocket change to the massive retailer. The Protecting America's Workers Act would update those penalties to make them matter, including criminal culpability for top corporate officials. But the measure will face fierce resistance from the business community, as evidenced by Chamber of Commerce testimony at a hearing about the bill in mid-March claiming that its corporate accountability measures would provoke a "witch hunt." The Chamber also held a private strategy meeting in January to marshal forces against OSHA's proposed ergonomics reporting rule.
The department's new fervor for enforcement will be hobbled at every turn if the nation's most disenfranchised workers continue to feel unsafe reporting nonpayment of wages or workplace hazards. And that means immigration and labor law reform, the ultimate force multipliers. "In the end, it comes down to the power of a worker to say to a boss, This job is dangerous. I won't do it," says Joel Shufro. While Secretary Solis has sought to shift the conversation on undocumented workers from border security to exploitation, she has not yet used her bully pulpit to create a sense of urgency on moving immigration reform on Capitol Hill. She has also, so far, mostly held her tongue on the Employee Free Choice Act, which is unlikely to reappear on the embattled Democrats' legislative agenda without strong intervention by the administration.
It is an open question whether Obama will eventually unleash his feisty labor secretary to push Congress to upgrade the nation's moribund worker protections. But few observers have any doubt that the new team at the Department of Labor will do all it can with the broken laws and clunky regulatory powers at its disposal. "They know all the tricks of the trade," says Celeste Monforton, a veteran of OSHA and MSHA who is now at George Washington University's School of Public Health. "They know the Chamber of Commerce is going to come and say, This is going to kill jobs. None of that will surprise them, and none of that should make them blink."
Two key antiwar critics, Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jim McGovern, are expected to introduce legislation as early as next week calling for a "flexible timetable" for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The proposal, now in final stages of preparation, was confirmed by McGovern and by Feingold's office.
The coordinated effort, the first of its kind during the Afghanistan war, is reminiscent of similar House-Senate proposals that eventually succeeded in winning majority support during the Vietnam War. During the Iraq War, resolutions calling for a timetable steadily advanced as well, until they became Obama's platform in 2008.
The new initiative will challenge the Obama administration and offer an organizing vehicle for the peace movement. The recent sixty-five votes for Representative Dennis Kucinich's antiwar resolution is not a true measure of antiwar sentiment in the Congress, McGovern told me, adding, "We haven't had our full debate on the war." Congressional restlessness is climbing over sacrificing American lives and dollars for a corrupt and recalcitrant Karzai government, he argues.
A Congressional letter from Feingold and McGovern questioning the current policy is expected shortly, to be followed by introduction of the legislation. McGovern also will introduce an updated version of last year's resolution requesting an exit plan from the administration. Last year's version had 100 House sponsors.
Congressional attention will soon turn to the Pentagon's requests for $33 billion to fund the current Afghan escalation and $159 billion for Iraq-Afghanistan war funding in fiscal year 2011. Obama has spoken against open-ended funding and pledged to "begin" troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011. Yet he has refused to agree to a date by which all troops will be withdrawn as he did during the Iraq war in 2008.
The Feingold-McGovern proposal could challenge the president if it achieves debate and a substantial, though minority, vote in favor. But it also will reveal a lack of Democratic unity in both houses. According to one ranking insider, "the mood...seems to be granting the administration some additional time as the new troops deploy. It may not be the right strategy but it suits most people politically."
A troop withdrawal deadline is seen by peace advocates as an incentive to draw the Taliban into peace talks, directly and indirectly. There are behind-the-scenes debates already underway over providing safe-passage documents which would enable Taliban leaders to enter Kabul or a third country for political negotiations, which Karzai favors. Former United Nations envoy Kai Eide supports negotiating with the Taliban too, but the US State Department and Pentagon are so far opposed both to negotiations and safe-passage documents.
Meanwhile, some Congressional staff and peace advocates are evaluating a menu of demands to make as possible amendments fleshing out an exit strategy in the budget battles ahead, among them:
§ ending the Iraq War according to agreements already supported by the Obama administration. Currently, existing Congressional budget language supports the timelines of (1) a US-imposed deadline of this August 3 for all US combat forces to be withdrawn, and (2) the US- Iraq pact's official December 31, 2011, deadline, when all remaining troops and contractors must leave Iraq, and bases shut down or handed over to the Iraqi government;
§ requiring all-party talks in Afghanistan leading to new internationally supervised elections, including elements of the Taliban, as a condition of funding;
§ conditioning further humanitarian and educational aid on protections for Afghan women's rights, and recognized human rights standards for detainees;
§ replacing ISAF troops in Afghanistan with peacekeepers from non- aligned countries, particularly from Islamic-majority ones;
§ challenging drone attacks as pre-emptive invasions of Pakistan's sovereignty to perform of secret extra-judicial killings, which result in large-scale civilian deaths and alienate the population.
The strongest peace movement argument would seem to be about budgetary impacts in a time of chronic recession. According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will become a three-trillion-dollar war. The Congressional Research Service says that the direct costs now reach $1.08 trillion, including $748 billion for Iraq, $340 billion for Afghanistan and $29 billion for "enhanced security."
As McGovern points out, "there is a price to be paid, in roads falling apart, emergency rooms closing down, finite resources that should be invested in putting people to work, but instead going to two wars."
That will be weighed against Democratic concerns about opposing the president during an election year.
But the measure floated by Representative Barbara Lee to cut funding for the escalation may receive support from as few as fifty or sixty members. Spending taxpayers' money without end on unfunded wars of unknown duration doesn't sound like fiscal wisdom, but when it comes to the Long War, both parties are loaded with big spenders.
About Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, is the author, most recently, of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm)
By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 8, 2010; A08
Senior Obama administration officials have discussed whether President Obama should propose his own solution to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including in a recent meeting between the president and seven former and current national security advisers, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
But officials, confirming a report Wednesday on the March 24 session by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, said there has been no decision to offer such a plan, either in the coming months or later this year. Officials said a presidential peace plan -- as opposed to "bridging proposals" that would be offered during peace talks between the two sides -- has long been considered an option for Obama. But they said the administration, now locked in tense talks with Israel about making confidence-building overtures to the Palestinians, is focused on arranging indirect talks between the two sides.
Some officials said the notion that Obama could offer his own plan might undercut those nascent efforts, because it could lead to a backlash among Israel's supporters and encourage the Palestinians not to make any concessions to Israel. Israeli officials have long opposed the introduction of an unilateral American plan, while Arab officials have pressed hard for one, saying it is the only way to break the impasse.
Jordan's King Abdullah II, who will visit Washington next week, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he will push Obama to offer his own plan because "tremendous tension" in the region over the failure to resolve the conflict has resulted in a "tinderbox that could go off at any time."
Still, it is notable that Obama would attend a discussion of such a concept with outside advisers. The president had popped into a meeting that national security adviser James L. Jones regularly holds with six of his predecessors at the White House when the subject turned to the Middle East. Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, made the case for an American-designed proposal and was supported by other participants in the room, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Obama, however, did not tip his hand on whether he supported the idea, participants said.
The basic parameters of a peace deal are well known and would probably closely resemble the "Clinton parameters," offered by Clinton 10 years ago in the waning days of his presidency: land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for much of the land taken by Jewish settlements in the West Bank; billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for giving up the right to return to their homes in Israel; an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with an agreement on oversight of religious sites in the Old City.
Advocates of an American plan say the two parties are incapable of making such concessions themselves; the current Israeli government, for instance, won't halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem despite intense U.S. pressure. But detractors say such a plan is only a recipe for putting pressure on Israel, while even some supporters caution that the timing must be right -- such as in the midst of viable peace talks -- or else the impact of the gesture might be wasted.
A major stumbling block to any peace plan is that 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when Clinton offered his proposal, which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways.
If you want to sound sophisticated and worldly — or just not embarrass yourself — when discussing current affairs, take a look at the VOA Pronunciation Guide. It’s a repository of pronunciation keys and audio files (mp3) for people and places in the news from around the world. The search form is easily understood — use the “Exact Search” box if you’re sure of how to spell the name, the “Near Search” box if you’re not sure, the “List Lookup” dropdown menu if you want to browse through the entire database, or the “Origin” dropdown menu to view names by country. A Help screen and a Pronunciation Key are available.
Native speakers who were/are Cal Poly Pomona students provided all sound samples (in .wav format) for Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese names.
In today’s international business environment, it is exceedingly important to say your clients name correctly, you CANNOT afford to call Dumass, a Dumb-ass. The internet has removed international boundaries and people are making new friends via email and chat every second, would you not want your friends to be able to pronounce your name correctly?
Pinky Thakkar (silent “h”), an engineer from Mumbai, started the Web site www.pronouncenames.com after she moved to San Jose, Calif., and mispronounced the “J” in “San Jose,” not giving it the “H” sound used in Spanish words. Properly pronouncing person and place names proved nearly impossible for Ms. Thakkar and her friends from abroad, she says.
More than 75,000 entries, including 38,000 audio files, have been submitted to Ms. Thakkar’s Web site since it launched in 2006. She manages the site with six other volunteers.
+ LanguageGuide.org: You’ll find a variety of volunteer-created resources here. The Pictorial Vocabulary Guides are especially charming. Select a language, choose a category, and then roll your cursor over a letter, number or picture to hear its name pronounced, such as the birds (os pássaros) in Brazilian Portuguese, or sea animals (umi no ikimono) in Japanese.
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