Rendition to Continue

This marks the first major disappointment I've experienced in President Obama's performance. The second major disappointment is in the works -- I expected something vastly different from him as part of the national conversation (or rabid ranting) on healthcare reform. (I expected him to carry out his mandate and not to pander to numbnut extremists.)

What has me upset? In short:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.

Human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying that continuing the practice, known as rendition, would still allow the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture. They said that promises from other countries of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.

“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.

Ms. Singh cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cable despite assurances against torture.

This is so far from acceptable that I'm almost speechless at the audacity. Almost.

The United States of America needs to be as transparent as possible in its treatment of *all* criminal suspects in order to reestablish some of the trust that the Bush administration allowed to erode so egregiously. There can be no more claims that the one hand knows not what the other has done.

I'm inflexible on this issue, having been a thoughtful adherent to the views of Amnesty International for several decades now. It's amazing how easy it is to distinguish between right and wrong when the "rules" of the game are straightforward and fixed. (That's not to say that policy review should not be a constant, ongoing endeavor. Scrutiny should be welcomed.)

I stand with AI in the belief -- in the knowledge -- that "torture and ill-treatment are wrong, always and everywhere..."; That only accountability for US counter-terrorism human rights violations will allow us to really counter terror with justice.

It was a "pushmi-pullyu" moment when I first saw this headline about the continuation of renditions, for it was published just below a related article: U.S. Shifts, Giving Detainee Names to the Red Cross.

WASHINGTON — In a reversal of Pentagon policy, the military for the first time is notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at a camp in Iraq and another in Afghanistan run by United States Special Operations forces, according to three military officials.

The change begins to lift the veil from the American government’s most secretive remaining overseas prisons by allowing the Red Cross to track the custody of dozens of the most dangerous suspected terrorists and foreign fighters plucked off the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a major advance for the organization in its long fight to gain more information about these detainees. The military had previously insisted that disclosing any details about detainees at the secretive camps could tip off other militants and jeopardize counterterrorism missions.

Both sides of the mouth, speaking at once? The eternal one-step forward, one-step back, the illusion of progress?

I would like to be able to extend to the Obama administration a measure of my trust -- and say that opening this population to the scrutiny and protection of the Red Cross should bolster my faith that future renditions will, of course, be free from torture and ill-treatment.

Sadly, I cannot extend that trust.

On a lighter note, look at the consternation and then the relief on this child's face at the National Spelling Bee -- as he contemplates numbnut.

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King of the False Syllogism

I'm going to go sit on the limb of the nearest tree and declare that Matthew Cooper (of The Atlantic fame) is an idiot.

I also am heaving sighs of relief after a period of being stressed, in a writerly way, about my tangential tendencies in composition. But then, maybe you haven't noticed the overwhelming weirdness of my attempts to manage The Segue.

It can be cause for cheer when a Greater Boob decides to sashay around all the verbiage. One might just get the chance to slip out the back.

Really, although he Took the Cake today, Matthew Cooper was wallowing in weirdness yesterday. I guess it was a warm-up exercise.

The title of yesterday's spasm?

"Clarence Thomas, Outcast? or President?"

No, I am not kidding. He notes that Thomas has recently recorded two lone dissensions on The Court. I know, I know, it makes me have cold shivers all up and down my spine. It also makes me "throw up a little bit in my mouth."

It's just a stone's throw from that priceless observation to this:

For what it's worth, I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Thomas
without the Anita Hill scandal. He surely would have been approved by the Senate
by a wider margin, but more importantly, would there have been an effort to
enlist him in electoral politics? It seems far fetched now, given what a recluse
Thomas has become and how no one has left the bench in more than a generation to pursue another political office.

Spellbinding, isn't it, how he... does that? I mean, wow, it wouldn't have - spasmodic coughing fit - even *occurred* to me back in 1991 to think that a political ambition aimed at winning the Presidency of the United States was in peril, especially since that dream was deferred due to the misfortune of becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

I mean, I remember there being a heightened sense of awareness about sexual harassment in the workplace. I believe that the degree of women's involvement in political life markedly increased after the hearings.

Oh yeah. And I know that most of the women of my acquaintance were devastated by his appointment.

Ah, well. This is what Matthew Cooper did today, in terms of a public writing, in a public forum. False Syllogism, at the very least.

Hey? Am I being Punk'd? That's it, isn't it! Matthew is punkin' us!

Jun 26 2009, 9:25 am by Matthew Cooper

What Barack Obama Owes Michael Jackson
They were born three years and 24 days apart. And a more than an ocean separated the only child of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother and the Gary, Indiana kid who was the seventh of nine children. It would be wrong to read too much political meaning into the career of Michael Jackson and that of Barack Obama. (No one is thinking tonite that Hillary Clinton owes a debt of gratitude to Farrah Fawcett.) But it would be myopic to say that Jackson had a huge cultural impact and no political impact, either.


After all, as much as the oft mentioned Huxtables of "The Cosby Show" fame or any number of crossover African-American politicians, Jackson broke down walls between races with music that sent suburban whites and inner-city blacks to say, "I want my MTV!", the fledgling cry of the music cable network when it was still trying to get pickup.

In his androgyny and overall weirdness, Jackson was never really a role model in the sense that you could try and be like him. His talents were too otherworldly and so were his oddities. But he was entertaining and by bringing people together, especially in the 80s when race relations seemed more strained--remember Howard Beach or "Do the Right Thing?" or the Giuliani-Dinkins race--that meant something.

I don't have my copy of "Dreams From My Father" at hand to know if the 44th president mentions Jackson but it's hard to imagine that he didn't have a disc to take with him to Occidental or Columbia. And if he didn't own one, he surely knew the words which made him like everyone else. Barack Obama lived a life of accomplishment, an upward trajectory from Punahou to Harvard, Springfield to the White House that seems incredibly void of demons whereas Jackson was all demons. They're no more alike personally than...

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If you cannot quite place "Matthew Cooper" within the annals of journalism, here are some of the highpoints, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Matthew Cooper (born 1963) is a former reporter for Time who, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller was held in contempt of court and threatened with imprisonment for refusing to testify before the Grand Jury regarding the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation...
On June 29, 2005, U.S. Federal judge Thomas F. Hogan gave Miller and Cooper one week to comply with the Grand Jury order to testify or face the maximum penalty of 18 months in prison

The United States Supreme Court declined the reporters' appeal of the contempt of court finding.

On July 6, 2005, Cooper agreed to testify, thus avoiding being held in contempt of court and sent to jail. Cooper said "I went to bed ready to accept the sanctions for not testifying," but told the judge that not long before his early afternoon appearance at court he had received "in somewhat dramatic fashion" an indication from his source freeing him from his commitment to keep his source's identity secret.

Cooper stated in court that he did not previously accept a general waiver to journalists signed by his source (whom he did not identify by name), because he had made a personal pledge of confidentiality to his source. The 'dramatic change' which allowed Cooper to testify was later revealed to be a phone conversation between lawyers for Cooper and his source confirming that the waiver signed two years earlier applied to conversations with Cooper. Citing a "person who has been officially briefed on the case," The New York Times identified Karl Rove as the individual in question. Rove's own lawyer later confirmed this information. According to one of Cooper's lawyers, Cooper had previously testified before the grand jury regarding conversations with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Jr., chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, after having received Libby's specific permission to testify. Rove's own lawyer later confirmed this information.

On July 25, 2005, Cooper wrote an account of his grand jury testimony for Time. The article, entitled "What I Told The Grand Jury," concludes:

So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the "agency" on "WMD"? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me. At this point, I'm as curious as anyone else to see what Patrick Fitzgerald has.

. . . In that testimony, I recounted an on-the-record conversation with Libby that moved to background. On the record, he denied that Cheney knew about or played any role in the Wilson trip to Niger. On background, I asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to Niger. Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that too,' or words to that effect. Like Rove, Libby never used Valerie Plame's name or indicated that her status was covert, and he never told me that he had heard about Plame from other reporters, as some press accounts have indicated.

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So he took a job at Talking Points Memo... and in early June of this year:

June 09, 2009
Cooper joins the Atlantic

Matt Cooper, who recently lost his job at Portfolio when the magazine closed and took a reduced role at Talking Points Memo, now has a new gig: he's writing for The Atlantic's politics page.

UPDATE: Cooper points out in a tweet that he's still at TPM.

By Michael Calderone 03:03 PM

Penpals: Write for Health Care Reform

Remember back in February, when the world was new? My favorite health care policy wonk and medical blogger, Shadowfax, was sulking because an old friend from his doubtlessly grungy Chicago days had taken a new job, and -- in his words: "He dropped me like a warm turd."

A word [As in: Psst! Over here! Shhh! Quiet, listen up!] -- I am embarrassed to say that I have long periods of mental idling, much like a coughing old jalopy, and while my opinions about health care reform are incredibly strong, they are not well informed beyond the data of the personal. So I do what I always do when smarty-panted conversants start to leave footprints on the top of my head: I locate those that seem closest to professing my own sentiments, but sanely and clearly, and I read them. Yes, I cut out a huge portion of original and new material that I rightly ought to be processing. But I also benefit from well-appointed points-of-vue, dotdotdot.

In short, I let other people do the work.

I am very fond of Shadowfax's old friend. Our relationship is new, and probably conducted under the observant eyes of his protection detail. I've become an ardent penpal.

Okay, so I have written him once. And I wrote "my story" up for submission to a chatty, lighthearted version of the serious, fer-real working group on health care reform.

I've emailed more regularly, and he tweets me all the live long day.

I haven't quite recovered from my "eureka!" moment (long time fan of Archimedes in the tub...). As I began setting down my story of health care and health insurance difficulties, it became crystal clear that any changes made will come too late to help me.

I am no longer one of those people who might slip through the various and sundry cracks -- I've already fallen through; I've already lost hope.

Given that this places me squarely among the most powerless, I expect my letters and emails to self-destruct within 30 seconds of their being opened.

President Obama needs vibrant, smart, effective people around him. My smart-ass, self-pitying "story"? It doesn't inform, nor does it inspire. It whines.

The NYT tells me this morning that Obama's point man on launching health care reform legislation is Senator Max Baucus of Montana, chair of the Senate Finance Committee -- "a political shape-shifter and crafty deal maker who is not fully trusted by either party."

It sounds, cough, like a match made in heaven.

And so... bleary-eyed and very sick, I resolved to write Shadowfax's good buddy one more time, and to copy that letter to every member of the Senate Finance Committee, which -- imagine the coincidence -- is actually asking for popular feedback.

As I familiarized myself with the Finance Committee's web site, I felt rather stupid for not having known of its existence or importance before today.

Senator Baucus authored a 98-page whitepaper -- Call to Action: Health Reform 2009 -- back on November 12, 2008.

There is access provided, via video and text, to all eight Health Care Reform Hearings held thus far in 2009, and the list of witnesses is impressive.

Most importantly?

To submit comments on the Senate Finance Committee’s Health Reform Policy Options email PDF or Word files to Health_Reform@finance‐dem.senate.gov

You who have not slipped through the cracks, you who remain stolid contributing members of society -- please find the time to put your thoughts on health care reform down in the requisite technical form, and send it off to the politicians.

I've always wanted to use the phrase "It is incumbent upon..."

It is incumbent upon us all -- upon the pity-partying, upon the thriving, upon the vast majority of those who simply and steadily struggle -- to tell our stories, yes, but also to frame those stories with information and suggested guidance.

If you want to give your blogging brain a jumpstart, give some of Shadowfax's opinion pieces a good read.

Oh! Oh, my! What do you mean you don't share my liberal leftwing gay pinko points-of-view? I'm shocked. Share, then, if you will, those policy wonks you'd like to make part of the common information pool. To whom do you give a nod of the head?

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Well, I'm off to make friends and influence people. Maybe feed a few cats, do a little laundry.
Take morning meds (This month's medication cost? $1113.00), recharge the wheelchair, get in bed, elevate the frozen purple legs, the throbbing infected shoulder and arm. Take a few pain pills, decide whether my ballooning face (the left side only) warrants a call to my MDVIP doctor. Ponder where I will come up with the $1,327 for my monthly BCBS health insurance premium. If I get rid of telephone, internet, television, and Netflix -- will I be able to make a payment to the hospital where I am having my 6th major surgery in less than 9 months -- in just 2 weeks? Will the fact that I still owe $900 impact their willingness to accept me, yet again, as a patient? What will happen if I code again? Is it possible some doctor or nurse will decide that I shouldn't be vigorously resuscitated, being such a drain on an active and working society? No wonder I don't sleep.