Mark A. R. Kleiman

In an earlier post, [*] I tried to use the Iowa Electronic Market numbers to calculate the probabilities that Davis, Schwarzenegger, and Bustamante would wind up with the governorship when the dust cleared.

The calculation presented was simple, elegant, and wrong. I can only attribute the absence of a flood of emails correcting my logic (indeed, of any emails at all) to the forbearance of my readers. [Where did you say you had studied statistics, Mr. Kleiman? Oh, Harvard. Well, that makes sense then.]

From the propositions that Round I was 70% likely to carry (i.e., that Davis would be thrown out of office) and that Bustamante was 60% likely to win Round II, I calculated that Bustamante was .7 x .6 = .42 likely to become governor, while Schwarzenegger was .7 x .4 = .28 likely to become governor.

The error, which of course you spotted at once, was the elementary one of assuming that two events were independent when they weren't. As a result, I overestimated Bustamante's chances and underestimated Schwarzenegger's. (In addition, the Iowa numbers have changed in Schwarzenegger's favor since I wrote.)

Round I and Round II are certainly not independent events. Republicans are more likely to vote "Yes" on Round I and for Schwarzenegger in Round II, and Democrats more likely to vote "No" and "Bustamante." That being so, a big Democratic turnout that helps Bustamante also helps Davis to survive. So the possible cases in which Bustamante wins Round II are disproportionately cases in which Davis survives Round I and Round II is irrelevant, while the cases in which Schwarzenegger wins Round II are disproportionately cases in which it matters.

Using the previous numbers (70% that Round I carries, 60% that Bustamante wins Round II), and assuming that, if Davis survives Round I, it's 90% likely that Bustamante comes out on top in Round II, then in .3 x .9 = .27 of all cases both things happen: Davis survives, and Bustamante wins what is then a meaningless beauty contest. If in 60% of all cases Bustamante wins Round II, and in 27% of all cases Bustamante wins Round II and Davis survives Round I, then in only 60% - 27% = 33% of all cases does Bustamante become governor. If Davis has a 30% chance and Bustamante a 33% chance, then by subtraction Schwarzenegger must have a 37% chance.

Now the numbers have changed further in Schwarzenegger's favor. The market has Davis about .33 to survive, and Schwarzenegger about .53 to win Round II. Again assuming that if Davis wins Bustamante is 90% likely to win, that works out to:

Davis: 33%
Bustamante: 17%
Schwarzenegger: 50%.

Update A reader points me to Tradesports, which has very different odds for Davis and Bustamante than the ones computed above (to find the recall market, type "recall" in the search field:

Schwarzenegger: 47%
Bustamante: 35%
Davis: 18%

This seems to be a more efficient market, as measured by bid-asked spreads. Arbitrage, anyone?

(Note: Tradesports also has a Presidential market, which gives Bush about two chances in three to win. )

Bustamante has to do something about the "Bustamante-is-a-racist" meme that Glenn Reynolds, Tacitus, Michelle Malkin, Mickey Kaus, and the Fox News crew have been so skillfully spreading, with so little factual basis. If I were in his shoes, I would say something like "Anyone who thinks that California ought to become part of Mexico again, or that California will become part of Mexico again, has been drinking the wrong brand of tequila. Next question?"

One more update

A long telepone conversation with Guy Gugliotta of the Washington Post led me to realize that I'd been wrong a second time. There is in fact an interpretation of the Iowa results that makes them more or less consistent with the Tradesports results, and that's that Iowa bettors are figuring that the dependency between Round I and Round II goes both ways. If on Election Day it looks as if Schwarzenegger is going to beat Bustamante, then lots of people (such as me) who would prefer Bustamante to Davis but want at all costs to keep Schwwarzenegger out of office will switch from "Yes" in Round I (and Bustamante in Round II) to "No" in Round I (and Bustamante in Round II). If that were the case, than maybe it's not so that the chances of Davis being booted are negatively correlated with the chances of Bustamante winning Round II. That doesn't make my original assumption of independence any less wrong conceptually, but it might not be important numerically.

All of this suggests to me that the Iowa market on California, like the Iowa market on the Presidency, is very badly designed.

And, by the way, Tradesports has now (9/5) flipped, with Davis's survival below 20% and Bustamante slightly ahead of Schwarzenegger.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:37 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

Salam Pax describes how the hunt for terrorists looks from the Iraqi viewpoint. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:16 AM | |

Is Brit Hume really stupid enough to have believed this when he said it? Possible, I suppose, but rather far-fetched.

More likely, Hume is the type of debater of whom it was said, "He uses statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:33 PM | |

Savor, if you will, this reflection on the decision by the Episcopal Church USA to ratify the selection of a gay man as a bishop:

REFLECTING ON THE ROBINSON ELECTION, David Anderson, president of the American Anglican Council said if Christians die in countries like Nigeria and Indonesia, countries with strong Islamic populations, because the mullahs read the General Convention news to the Muslim Friday Prayers services, the blood of our Christian brothers and sisters will be on the hands of this Convention and the Bishops and Deputies who voted for the hugely volatile issues. This [*] is from a quasi-official website maintained by the American Anglican Council. I can't find a primary-source cite for the quotation or its precise wording.]

Let me make sure I understand this: If Muslims who hate homosexuals decide to murder Christians, the blood of those Christians will be on the hands of Christians who fail to hate homosexuals enough.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:26 PM | |

As Atrios points out [*], the fact that Cruz Bustamante was a member of MEChA as a college student isn't really much of a reason not to vote for him.

(Here's the slimeball from Fox News. That the story seems to have been timed to help keep the Schwarzenegger mess off the airwaves is, of course, merely speculation on my part. Glenn Reynolds did his bit to spread the word that MEChA consisted of "fascist hatemongers," [*] but, as is so often the case with Glenn, when you follow the link you discover that the source material doesn't support the hysteria. MEChA, like most student nationalist groups, has a bunch of silly ideas, but none of them, even as represented by MEChA's critics, seems to involve either fascism or hate-mongering.)

Since he belonged to MEChA thirty years ago, Bustamante has generated a substantial public record, and as far as I can tell there's not a single thing in it that suggests he hates anybody.

On the other hand, Bustamante's support for gasoline prince controls [*] is an excellent reason to vote against him. Does he have fond memories of lines at gasoline pumps? This is really bad news for California Democrats, and for California. Not that this dimwit idea has a snowball's chance in Hell of becoming law, but the fact that the man who looked a minute ago like the least bad alternative we had either

(1) doesn't understand basic economics or
(2) does understand, and is deliberately misleading the voters

could hardly be more depressing.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:25 PM | |

ABC News has a new poll, among those who say they're "certain" to vote, showing Schwarzenegger with a comfortable lead, 45-29. [*] The Iowa market is taking the new numbers seriously; Schwarzenegger is now favored over Bustamante, though the vote-share market shows them about even.

Update Mickey Kaus points out that the poll in question is a "robo-poll," which of course would naturally favor the Terminator. He also reads between the lines that ABC's own director of polling is backing away from the result. Perhaps due to Kaus's comment, IEM has now gone back to even money.

Footnote Mickey has also been hinting recently that the LA Times was sitting on some sort of Arnold-related dirt. Presumably that would be distrinct from the Oui interview [*], which Mickey refers to as the "Schwarzengangbanger issue," or the Gigi Goyette business [*], which is actually pretty disgusting if true, as Goyette now says it is. (That affair reportedly started when Goyette was 16, which is two years below the statutory age in California, and when Schwarzenegger was already married.) My bet is that all of this stays below the radar screen.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:25 AM | |

Randy Barnett [*] comes up with an interesting argument for one version of Constitutional originalism.

But he seems to gloss over one small point. If he's right, then the Constitution we have actually been living under for the couple of centuries differs in important ways from the Constiution as drafted, which he claims is the only real Constitution because only an unchanging text can bind officials.

So what are we supposed to do now, throw out all the precedents and start fresh? How is anyone supposed to know what the law is if the judges ignore precedent? Even if it were true that living by a document of unchanging meaning is the only guard of liberty, it's hard to see how to get there from here.

Barnett also needs to explain how it is that a country living under (on his account) effectively no Constitution at all has done so well for itself.

Update Barnett responds.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:36 AM | |

Eugene Volokh has sharpened the argument by analogy into such a deadly weapon that I'm surprised they still let him on airplanes. No, I'm not going to tell you what it's about; that would spoil it. Go read. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:32 AM | |

The Iowa Electronic Markets webpage has opened a futures market on the recall. The contract structure makes it a little tricky to go from the prices to predicted outcomes, but Davis is about a 70-30 underdog, and the market is predicting the recall will carry by about 10 percentage points; you can get an effective 20-to-1 against the election's not being held in October. [*]

(That last bet seems tempting to me; if I were a judge, I'd have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that recounting some of the votes in Florida was an equal protection violation but running a governor's race in California 40% of the usual polling stations closed isn't an equal protection violation, especially since California has four counties covered under the Voting Rights Act.)

In Round II, it's Bustamante 60% to win, Schwarzenegger 40%, rest nowhere; the market predicts that Bustamante will get about 45% of the vote, Schwarzenegger 35%, and the rest 20%.

I've been more pessimistic on Davis than 70-30, and more optimistic on Bustamante than 60-40, but not enough so to want to put any money down at current prices. Multiplying out, we get Bustamante with about a 40% chance of being governor when the dust clears, Davis and Schwarzenegger with about a 30% chance each. Update: Wrong! See correction [*] above.

If California's political insiders agree, then Bustamante shouldn't have much trouble raising the money he needs.

Too bad the market didn't open a week ago; it would have been insteresting to see what happened to the Schwarzenegger prices when Simon dropped out. The current vote-share prices seem to reflect a fairly strong belief that McClintock will stay in to the end.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:49 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

Here's the basic fact facing the candidates in the recall election:

If California does not raise taxes signficantly this year, it will go bankrupt, this year. There literally won't be money in the state treasury to pay current bills.

The pseudo-budget passed by the legislature and signed by the governor includes several assumptions contrary to fact. In particular, it assumes a 10% cut in the state payroll, but we're now two months in to the fiscal year and no one has been laid off or had his pay cut. Every passing month means that the cut, when and if it happens, will have to be that much bigger in order to get to the 10% target for the whole year. And for the part of the state workforce under union contracts, pay cuts will require negotiations: a process that hasn't started and for which success can't be assured.

The budget also assumes cash from bond sales that may or not be legal, and which are now being challenged in court. So the wheels could actually fall off even sooner. [*]

Most of the state budget goes to expenditures that are mandated either by the state constitution and various initiatives (in particular, Prop. 98 protects state funding for local education) or under federal programs, some of which have funding formulas that will cut $1 in federal payments to the state for every $1 the state cuts back its spending.

[My UCLA colleague Dan Mitchell provides the details:

Dan Mitchell on the California Budget.doc ]

Only Peter Ueberroth and Cruz Bustamante, among the four serious Round II candidates, have acknowledged this simple reality: Bustamante more forthrightly than Ueberroth. McClintock took "the pledge" years ago, and Schwarzenegger is hedging only by saying that he might have to raises taxes in the face of a major natural disaster: after backing and filling a little, he has now taken taxes off the table in considering how to handle the deficit. He has also pledged, as has McClintock, to eliminate the car tax, and has also promised no cuts in education, which makes up a little more than half of the budget.

(As this story from Fox News [*] demonstrates, that's not good enough for the true-believing tax-haters, including bankruptcy advocate Grover Norquist. They want an absolute and unconditional read-my-lips pledge.)

So if Schwarzenegger is elected and keeps his word, the state will go broke. It's possible for the state to function in bankruptcy, as New York City did. But not paying one's bills when they come due is disgraceful and dishonest, and that's just as true of a state as it is of an individual.

This is one of the many cases where liberals' reluctance to use moral language keeps them from taking advantage of the voters' strong instinct for basic decency. If I were running the Bustamante campaign, my slogan would be "Decent people pay their bills."

Update Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee [*]is even gloomier than I am, pointing out that none of the candidates has even started to address the political reality that the legislature seems unprepared for either tax hikes or spending cuts.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:15 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

Desperate to get some sort of handle on Iraqi resistance, the American occupying forces have begun to recruit alumni of the Iraqi Secret Police. [*]

The arguments for and against that move are neatly summed up in three proverbs: the one about recuiting the best poacher as the gamekeeper, the one about supping with the Devil, and the one about dogs and fleas.

It's quite likely that some of those folks can help prevent acts of resistance against the US military and of terrorism against Iraqis and international institutions. On the other hand, it's equally likely that using them now puts them in a better position to regain power in the new Iraq, and having them in power means that they get to run their opponents through wood-chippers. It's virtually always the case that the secret police constitute the worst and the most dangerous element of a totalitarian regime.

From this distance, it's hard to tell whether the decision to recruit the secret policemen is, on balance, a good one or a bad one. But it's clearly a move we very much would have preferred not to make, and a sign that, pace all the happy h.s. coming from the Spin Machine, things are not going well. It's the opposite of the decision made earlier -- and now being criticized as a mistake [*] -- to disband the Iraqi army. It is also a bad fit with another earlier decision (one which seemed to me like a good idea at the time): the decision to purge Ba'athists from Iraq's civil institutions, such as universities and hospitals. [That move was the subject of an exchange between Max Sawicky and the undersigned [*] some months ago.]

As if that weren't enough bad news from Iraq for one twenty-four hour period, the New York Times reports [*] that the chief difference of opinion among the Shi'a clerics in Iraq is whether to join the armed resistance now to fight to make Iraq an Islamic Republic like Iran or instead to wait and establish an Islamic Republic like Iran in the elections we've promised to hold.

For now, I'm holding on to my view that war was the least bad option, but I have to admit I'm now holding on by my fingernails. A year from now, I may well remember having been against the whole business from its inception.

Update Joshua Micah Marshall -- who, like me, is ambivalent about whether recruiting from the former secret police is a good idea or not -- has some thoughts on what the need to do it tells us about the coherence and feasibilty of the neocons' much-touted "democratic transformation of the Middle East."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:40 PM | |
Thread: The War in Iraq

[If you're just coming in to the Valerie Plame story, you might want to start with this review of the bidding. The thread starts here. ]

Ambassador Joseph Wilson dropped a bombshell at a forum organized by Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington. [*]

[You'll need to click on "video of the event," and if your machine has pop-up protection, you'll have to hold down the "control" key while doing so.

[The key exchange is about 80% of the way through; in Windows Media, it comes on when the cursor is just above and to the right of the "mute" button. Idaho EV, one of CalPundit's commenters, timed it as coming between 1:17:53 and 1:20:39 of the tape.]

Wilson was asked whether he trusted the FBI to investigate the case. He started by saying that he had to speak hypothetically, since whether a crime was committed or not depended on his wife's status, about which he will not comment. He then explained the process, and expressed confidence that the career-service folks would play it straight, especially since a number of Members of Congerss, including not only Schumer and Durbin but also Henry Waxman and Hillary Clinton, were actively interested in the case and had promised him to keep the pressure on.

"I have confidence at the professional level that whatever they think is doable will be done." He acknowledged some uncertainty about whether public discussion might inhibit the investigation rather than forwarding it.

Then he opened up:

At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

Josh Marshall had already noted his belief that Wilson had a suspect in mind. But having someone in mind is one thing, and making what is virtually a public accusation of a an aggravated felony is something else. If Wilson doesn't have the goods, he risks being personally discredited in a way that's very hard to recover from.

Now that Rove has been accused, it's for him to respond. It's a simple yes or no: Did he talk to Novak about Plame, or instruct anyone else to do so? I hope that some credentialled journalists will be asking him that question.

(Thanks to Pacific Views [*] for the link, and to an alert reader for the tip. Oddly, none of the coverage of the Inslee meeting seemed to have picked up on what seemed to me like the big news. A Google for "Joseph Wilson Rove handcuffs" yields six blogs and no real media.)

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:55 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

As if worrying about Gov. Aaaaaahnold weren't enough, Californians have to deal with another bad idea thrown up by that other Progressive feature of our constitution, the initiative. This time it's Prop. 54, formerly the Racial Privacy Initiative and now CRENO. It's from the wonderful people who brought you Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action. Now they want to forbid any gathering of information on racial or ethnic identity by any state agency, except for a weird crazy-quilt of exemptions (it exempts medical research but not public health research, research conducted at the University of California with UC students as subjects but not research conducted at UC with non-students as subjects, assigning prisoners but not counting people subjected to traffic stops). [Text here.]

As my colleague Andy Sabl points out in today's LA Daily News [*] the result would not just be to devastate key data-collection efforts (if birth certificates don't show race, how can you tell whether we're making progress in reducing infant mortality among African-Americans?) but to cripple the enforcement of all sorts of "color-blind" civil rights laws by making it harder to tell where discrimination is taking place. Under the proposed law, if a city just happened to have an all-white police force, no state agency would be officially allowed to take cognizance of that fact.

CRENO is truly Lysenkoist in its attempt to prevent the collection of information that might be inconsistent with the social purposes or ideological stances of its sponsors. I'm waiting to hear from the vocal opponents of campus hate speech codes (which they say interfere with freedom of expression and thus freedom of inquiry) about this much graver threat coming from the right rather than the left.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:18 PM | |

Newsweek and Zogby have almost identical numbers (on slightly different questions) about re-electing Bush: Newsweek has 44-49 against, while Zogby is at 45-48. The combined sample size is nearly 2000.[*] Like Schwarzenegger, Bush has managed to generate an aura of invincibility which is itself a significant campaign advantage. But between the poll numbers and the Iowa Elections Market (which has Bush behind either Hillary (!) or Player to Be Named Later, and even with everyone else) [*], I'm not sure how long that aura can last.

Bush's job approval is still in positive territory, though it's been trending down. If I had to guess, I'd guess that he's now pretty much down to his hard core. I think the most likely outcome is that we'll be up late on Election Night.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:43 PM | |

The same LA Times poll that showed Round I tightening, with the Yes side up only 50-45, showed Bustamante with a huge lead over Schwarzenegger, 35-22. Simon, who just dropped out, had only 6%, and not all of that will go to Schwartzenegger. Moreover, the poll shows Cruz with good net positive favorability, 48-29; Schwarzenegger's is a much less impressive 46-44. (See, I told you [*]everyone was misunderestimating the intelligence of the the California electorate.)[*]

That the findings in the LA Times poll were better for both Davis and Bustamante than those of the other polls makes me wonder a little bit whether the sample or the weighting was somehow skewed toward Democrats; on the other hand, it might just mean that the situation is very fluid and polling a few days later produced a much different result.

What seems to be happening is that Schwarzenegger is caught in the same vise that always catches moderate Republicans in California; on the one hand, he needs to edge right to capture votes from the true believers, but on the other hand, when he does that, he puts himself out of the California mainstream. He's doing much better among the conservatives, both in California and nationally. [*] Rush Limbaugh, without actually taking back any of the nasty things he said about Aaaahnold earlier, is now saying nice things about him, as is Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Justice, who no doubt sees in Schwarzenegger's candidacy an opportunity to advance his announced goal of having at least on state government go bankrupt. [*] But the more conservative AS is, the less of a shot he has at getting the independent votes he needs to compete.

The White House has signalled its support for Schwarzenegger and has probably been doing some of the behind-the-scences muscling that got Issa and Simon out of the race and is now presumably focusing on Ueberroth and McClintock. They clearly don't care what he has to say to get elected; after all, who should know better than they how easy it is to campaign as a moderate and govern as an extremist? But the rank and file tends to be less knowledgeable and more sincere. Schwarzenegger hasn't paid his dues with them the way Bush did, and now he's suffering for it. (Still unspoken is any concern the California right wing -- Clinton-haters every one -- might have about Schwarzenegger's personal life, but again it's hard to believe that those concerns aren't present below the surface.)

Whatever you think of the absolute numbers in the new poll, it reinforces my conviction that Democratic effort ought to be going into supporting Bustamante in Round II rather than "No" (i.e., Davis) in Round I. If Davis is down 5 when Bustamante is up 13, it's hard to tell a story where Davis survives Round I but Schwarzenegger comes out ahead in round II.

Be that as it may, the timing couldn't be better for Bustamante. He was having trouble raising money, with less than $300k in the door as of Friday. Now the wallets of those who need access to the governor's office should start to open up for him.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:45 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

The eight Associate Justices of the Alabama Supreme Court have acted to overrule on Chief Justice Moore on the Ten Commandments, and the judicial ethics commission has suspended him from office pending a hearing on his dismissal.[*] Attorney General Bill Pryor, who supported Judge Moore's position as long as he could, will now be in the position of making the case on behalf of the state that the Chief Justice should be dismissed.

It's truly gratifying to see the Republican establishment in Alabama reacting with such complete propriety; they are acting, apparently unanimously, as if they believed in the rule of law. Assuming they reflect the ruling opinion in their state, it's possible that the political Bible-thumpers, such as Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, Alan Keyes, and James Dobson, have attempted bridge too far this time. (Falwell is urging that the supporters of the momument force a confrontation in which military or police have to come into the courthouse "with jackhammers" to enforce the federal court order.)
Some key Religious Right figures thought so even before the revolt of the Associate Justices; according to the Dallas Baptist Standard, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Jay Sekulow, head of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, had already questioned Moore's stance. [*]

All in all, it's a great object lesson in respect for the law. All it lacks is the commentary of the figure who, because he is Head of State as well as Chief of Government, ought to be reading the lesson. [

[When T.R. said that the Presidency was a "bully pulpit," he was using a bit of Gay Nineties slang ("bully" = phat, def, fab, cool, neat, awesome), and suggesting that the White House made a superb place from which to preach the sermons on our civil religion. He did not, contrary to the seeming beliefs of some of his successors, mean that it was a good place for to bully people from, or a good place for a bully to occupy. Hermeneutics is always tough, especially cross-culturally, and of course a different time is a different culture.]

A sympathetic reader of my work was puzzled by the rage in my earlier post [*] on the subject. Perhaps you were, too, or were instead merely resigned to more Bush-bashing from a fellow otherwise occasionally capable of rational thought. My reader wrote:

Judge Moore has been suspended from the bench and they will be voting whether to remove him permanently. The system worked the way it is supposed to. The President and Congress had no reason to become involved in a state matter and it was good that they did not. I wasnt't aware that the House voted to overturn a law. Which law was that?

That my correspondent didn't know (and perhaps you didn't either, gentle friend) testifies to the failure of the press and the Democrats to do their joint job of making a huge fuss when Republicans do something absolutely and utterly awful. I was referring to the Hostettler Amendments. Here they are, as described on their author's website:

The amendments to the Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary appropriations bill would block federal funds from being used to enforce court decisions that found the use of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional and ordered the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court to remove the Ten Commandments from the courthouse. In Newdow v. U.S. Congress the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled that the voluntary recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional because the Pledge contains the phrase "under God."

The amendment prohibiting funds for enforcement of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance passed 307-119. The second amendment, which blocks enforcement of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Ten Commandments cannot be posted in the Alabama Supreme Court building, passed 260-161.

Hostettler goes on to develop a whole theory -- rather brilliant in the sheer perversity of its misapplication of the analysis in The Federalist showing the courts to be naturally the weakest, and thus the most trustworthy, branch -- that the Congress may properly overturn any decision it thinks wrong by refusing to appropriate funds to enforce it. [*]

If Hostettler's theory is true, the Congress could equally well overturn a verdict in a civil case, or a writ of habeas corpus. The theory would leave us with literally no legally enforceable right that the Congress could not take away.

That what was the House passed, without the President's ever saying a word against it. What do you want to bet that opponents of that provision are going to face ads back home accusing them of "voting to throw God out of the courthouse"? What do you want to be that it will cost some of them their seats?

The actions of the Alabama Supreme Court now make the Ten Commandments provision, though not the Pledge of Allegiance provision, moot. But the principle isn't moot. Remember, this isn't some item proposed by an irrelevant lunatic fringe. This passed the House of Representatives by a hundred votes. And every one of those 260 Congresscritters was violating his or her solemn oath, taken in almost every case on the Holy Bible, to "preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States." Pah!

Until the Republicans in Washington show themselves capable of the level of principled
Constitutionalism displayed by the Republicans in Alabama, I don't see how anyone who considers himself a lover of government under law can even consider voting Republican, no matter how much the tax bite hurts.

If there's a defense to be offered of the Hostettler Amendment, I'd like to hear it. [Glenn Reynolds thinks Moore is an idiotarian, (*) but doesn't have anything to say about Hostettler, whose actions pose a much more grave risk to our system of ordered liberty than Moore's.]

President Bush's friends ought to insist that the do the right thing in this case. As Mark Twain said, "It will please your friends and astonish the rest."

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:19 PM | |

Bill Simon has dropped out of the recall election, prompting Gray Davis's spokesman to remark that Round Two "is now a sideshow with one less clown." [*]

As an environmentalist, I'm sorry to see Simon go. He wasn't just talking about sustainability, he was practicing it: his entire campaign consisted of recycled materials. Well, now they can be composted.

At first blush, having Simon out of the race looks good for Schwarzenegger. If his problem is splitting the Republican vote, having one less Republican in the race must be good for him, right?
Maybe not. Ueberroth's dropping out would have been good for Schwarzenegger, since they're competing for the same bloc of moderate Republicans and independents. But Simon voters have another equally conservative (also more experienced, and reportedly much smarter and more knowledgeable) alternative in McClintock, who already had the endorsement of the California Republican Assembly, the biggest membership group on the California Republican right. Notice that Simon simply dropped out and said that there were too many Republicans in the race; he didn't withdraw in favor of Schwarzenegger.

With Simon out, McClintock will presumably have an easier time raising money and getting press coverage. A single right-wing candidate polling around 20% may also be more likely to hang on to his voters on election day than two right-wing candidates each polling in the single digits.

On balance, then, I guess that this is very slightly bad for Davis, because it makes Round Two slightly less chaotic, and probably somewhat good for Bustamante. The bad news is that it seems more plausible that Ueberroth will drop out, leaving Schwarzenegger a clean shot, than that Huffington and Camejo will do the same for Bustamante.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:20 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

My brilliant friend Steve Teles, who teaches politics at Brandeis only because I have so far failed to talk him into moving to UCLA, has some thoughts on the recall as an element of an electoral system. He thinks it's a bad idea:

There are a few basic reasons to be against the recall, in principle. They
are:

In making the first vote, on whether to recall or not, all these
institutional considerations should be foremost in voters' minds. And
regardless of what happens, people need to very seriously think about
ditching the recall process before it causes even more damage to the already
pathological way that California politics is organized.

All of that makes sense to me as an argument for repealing the recall provision of the California Constitution. (And I can add an additional argument drawn from the current situation: when a recall is sparked by a fiscal crisis, as is the case now, it is likely to make the crisis harder to resolve by freezing activity for a couple of months. California may already be bankrupt by the time a new governor takes office in October.)

I can think of some counter-arguments: in particular, the recall discourages the practice of simply lying your way through the election, as Gray Davis did this time, by making insanely optimistic predictions about the budget picture. On the other hand, the recall also discourages coming clean once one has done so. For example, Schwarzenegger's numerate supporters presumably hope that, once elected, he will toss his promises out the window and admit that taxes have to go up and education spending has to be cut, because the alternative is bankruptcy. But if he does so, it's certain that the Democrats would mount another recall drive, which might well succeed. Still, I think on balance Steve's arguments are convincing ones.

Here's a proposal that would largely, I think, eliminate Steve's valid concerns about the current process. Retain the recall, but eliminate the second-round vote on a successor. Instead, require that the Governor and Lieutenant Governor be elected as a ticket, as the President and Vice President now are, and provide that if the Governor is recalled the Lieutenant Governor succeeds, and appoints his own Lieutenant Governor, as a Vice President who becomes President appoints a replacement Vice President. That would take most of the partisan maneuvering out of the game.

All of that said, I think the arguments against the recall as an element of an electoral system, while they would have been rather strong arguments against signing the recall petition, are not as potent arguments for voting "No" on the first round. If the goal is to establish a precedent that a losing party that tries to use the recall to refight the last election loses, then the replacement of Davis by Bustamante seems to me just about as good as the retention of Davis.

I will certainly vote "No" if it looks as if Schwarzenegger is going to win the second round. That vote will be cast mostly on partisan and personal grounds, but Steve's arguments provide an independent set of reasons for voting that way, and perhaps a set that should be convincing to those who on partisan or personal grounds would prefer Schwarzenegger to Bustamante. But if it looks as if Bustamante is going to win, I plan to vote "Yes" on the first round, because on both partisan and personal grounds I think Bustamante would be a better (or at least less bad) governor than Davis has been or will be.

To repeat what I said earlier, I think it makes sense for Bustamante and his campaign to keep saying "No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante," but that doesn't mean that his supporters should, or will, follow that advice in the privacy of the polling booth. In any case, I think the argument is largely moot in practical terms: absent some political earthquake, it looks as if Davis is gone, so the remaining practical question is who will replace him.

Update I guess there must have been an earthquake I missed; the lastest LA Times poll shows the recall question within the margin of error. I now have to concede that the argument about how to vote on Round One is a practically significant argument.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:48 AM | |
Thread: California Recall

... just told Fox News where it could shove its trademark-infringment suit against Al Franken. [Here's the story [*] from (who else?) Fox News, which seems to have run the AP story unedited.]

Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan might be wrong, I suppose, but he wasn't in any doubt:

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," the judge said. "This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

The first print run of Franken's book is now set for 270,000.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:18 PM | |

Atrios [*] makes a principled argument against the California recall: it's undemocratic, he says, to overturn the result of a popular election. Now it's certainly a reasonable viewpoint that officials ought to have fixed terms rather than serving at the pleasure of the voters, but I'm not sure I see how a fixed-term system is more "democratic" than one that makes every official potentially accountable to the voters throughout his term.

Atrios likens the recall to the Clinton impeachment, and asks whether I'm aware of any "severe ethical transgressions" on Davis's part that would justify recalling him.

It is my view that the Clinton impeachment was wrong because Clinton hadn't done, and wasn't accused of having done, the sort of official misdeeds intended by the founders as the sole basis for impeachment. Impeaching Clinton was an abuse of power.

By contrast, the recall provision of the California constitution does not require that the officeholder be charged with any sort of misconduct; the discontent of the voters is sufficient reason. So I don't think it makes sense to ask whether the recall satisfies a requirement it doesn't have to meet.

But, since Atrios brings it up, yes: I am aware, as is everyone in California, of the Governor's habit of making decisions -- in particular decisions about which bills to sign and which to veto -- based on which side ponies up more money. Systematic bribery seems like a fairly serious ethical lapse to me.

Contributions will always influence policies until we have publicly funded campaigns, but the "for sale" sign on Davis's desk is unusually large and centrally placed. It's not merely a matter of doing things for groups that have contributed in the past and can be relied on to contribute in the future: it's more nearly an open auction. When Simon called Davis "California's first coin-operated Governor," no one bothered to disagree.

But even if you oppose the recall on principle, it's far too late to save Davis. Take a look at the polls at Daily Kos: every one of them has "Yes" in the high 50s and "No" in the mid-30s. Only outside California is Davis seen as having any chance at all. The only thing standing between us and Schwarzenegger is Bustamante.

It's appropriate for Bustamante to keep saying "No on recall; yes on Bustamante," in hopes that Davis will start saying the same thing. But money and effort devoted to saving Davis now is money and effort thrown away.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:00 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

The eight Associate Justices of the Alabama Supreme Court, taking their political lives in their hands (judges are elected in Alabama) have defied their Chief Justice and obeyed the federal courts in ordering the Ten Commandments monument blocked off from public view. Almost all of the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives (along with 50 renegade Democrats) have already violated their oaths of office (sworn, by most of them, on the Bible) to "preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States," by adding a rider to the appropriations bill for the judiciary forbidding the Marshal Service from enforcing the federal court order. [*]

The case really couldn't be simpler: When the federal courts declare what the Constitution, "the supreme law of the land," says, is that declaration binding? Or to put it even more bluntly, do we still live under a government of law?

Bill Pryor, the Alabama Attorney General who defended Moore's stance in court, and whose nomination as a federal appellate judge is still before the Senate, put it clearly [*]: "The rule of law means that no person, including the chief justice of Alabama, is above the law," Pryor said. "The rule of law means that when courts resolve disputes, after all appeals and arguments, we all must obey the orders of those courts even when we disagree with those orders."

Does the President of the United States agree? And if he does, will he summon up the courage to say so? Respect for the rule of law used to be a bedrock conservative principle. Anyway, the last time I checked, "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" was part of his job description. But my guess is that he will, once again, decide that the better part of valor is disretion, and discreetly continue his silent pandering to the religious bigots.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:58 PM | |

Daily Kos (1) thinks Gray Davis is likely to survive the recall and (2) thinks that would be a good thing. [*]

Those two beliefs, especially the second, are characteristic of Democrats nationally, but rare among Democrats in California. We all know that Davis is toast, and most of us regard toastitude as no more than he deserves.

Kos thinks that Davis can win this election by energizing core Democrats. He can't. Democratic identifiers are only about 40-45% of the California electorate. And Davis's speech at UCLA yesterday was apparently (I didn't see it) a complete fiasco. Text here [*]. Claiming credit for the fact that the blackout occurred back east, after the way Davis fumbled and bumbled the energy problem both before the crisis of 2001 and after, gets him nothing but a horselaugh.

I don't know anyone here who thinks Davis has a chance. Those of us who want to keep Schwarzenegger out of the governor's mansion are trying to get ourselves organized around Cruz Bustamante, for two reasons.

First, the arithmetic makes Bustamente a much better bet to win the beauty contest than Davis is to survive the yes-or-no. If the 40% of the voters who vote "no" (i.e., to keep Davis) vote for Bustamante as a backup, he wins easily, since McClintock and Simon, the two right-wing candidates, are almost sure to get 20% of the vote between them, and Ueberroth is likely to get as many votes as Arianna Huffington and Peter Camejo, the two left wing-nuts. Moreover, Bustamante is going to pick up some of the "yes" vote as well. What it comes down to is that it's easier to win an election if you only need 40% of the votes.

[I think part of the problem here is that people who don't live in California assume that Californians are so shallow and superficial that Schwarzenegger is guaranteed to win the beauty contest. But that "misunderestimates" the electorate here, and misunderstands how much the true-believing dittoheads hate Schwarzenegger and how powerful they are in the California GOP.]

Second, Bustamante might well be a better governor than Davis has been or could be. Davis has been a relentlessly money-driven and poll-driven governor; substantively, his administration has been fairly bad for most liberal causes. Davis defended Clinton during the impeachment, but was no use at all to Gore either during the campaign or during the recount. Bustamante is a far more consistent Democrat than Davis is. Moreover, while Bustamante isn't wildly popular with the rest of the political class, Davis is loathed, by Democrats as much as, or even more than, Republicans. ("There's no middle ground on Gray," Senate President John Burton has been quoted as saying. "You either hate him or you don't like him.")

Yes, allowing the Republicans a replay every time they lose an election would be bad, but let's not forget how Davis won that last election. He helped Bill Simon, an ethically and cognitively challenged wing-nut, beat Dick Riordan -- who would have been a credible opponent for Davis -- in the Republican primary, giving Californians virtually no choice. Even then, he almost managed to lose. So the notion that the recall is some sort of "insult to democracy" doesn't really hold water.

Davis's current strategy seems to be to weaken Bustamante to make it look likely that Schwarzenegger will win Part II, as a way of blackmailing people who can't stand Schwarzenegger into voting "No" on Part I. It doesn't deserve to work, and it isn't going to work.

I can understand the desire to fight this election as part of the great crusade against Bush. But that's not the way it looks here, and the more the national Democrats try to tell us in California that we ought to keep this turkey as an act of party loyalty, the sillier they look. If you want a Democrat in the governor's office here, start figuring out ways to help Bustamante.

Update Atrios dissents, and I reply. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:12 PM | |
Thread: California Recall

Eric Mink, in a column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch [*], mentions the Plame affair (though not her name) in passing as part of a long catalogue of the Bush Administration's horse's-head-in-the-bed tactics. (The first half of the column is about the same thing at Fox News.)

It's not at all far-fetched to compare Bush, in this regard, to Nixon; the fact that he doesn't look nearly as evil, though it makes the charge seem far-fetched, isn't really relevant. In the winter of 1972-73, when Nixon was riding as high as Bush was last December, and when the Watergate scandal seemed as likely to come to naught as the Plame affair does now, Richard Neustadt responded to a student's despairing comment with what proved to be prescience: "Don't worry about it. Nixon has no sense of limits, and that will destroy him."

I think about that prediction often. The American system of government, as Neustadt among others pointed out, relies heavily on the forbearance of its politicians toward one another: their self-restraint in not pushing every personal or partisan advantage to its maximum. Thus the sort of short-term maximization of the capacity to help friends and harm enemies that impresses the commentariat in a Nixon or a Gingrich or a DeLay or a Karl Rove (yes, or a James Carville) frequently carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Yes, I admit that sounds like wishful thinking. But there's enough historical precedent to make despair as unjustified as blithe confidence.

[Summary of the Plame affair here.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:56 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

The LA Times on Sunday had a spread on the candidates' positions on the state budget crisis. It could hardly have been sadder. Naturally, Aaaaaanold refused to reply at all; that made his response easily the most straightforward and least insulting of the bunch.

If you, like me, thought that Peter Ueberroth was running as the adult supervision in the race, forget about it: he's still promising to abolish unspecified "wasteful spending" and waffling about the need for tax increases. His newly unveiled "economic plan" [*] relies largely on a tax amnesty and asset sales, both of them irrelevant to the problem of getting expenditures in line with sustainable revenues.

Bustamante is a little more serious -- he's willing to admit that taxes have to go up, and even specify which taxes in a fairly sensible way -- but doesn't seem to be willing to tell the voters that there are good things the state could afford to do when the capital gains taxes were rolling in that it can't afford to do now.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:43 PM | |

Brad DeLong explains [*] why the "jobs" argument for restricting trade is mostly nonsense. Gephardt fans, please copy. DeLong doesn't address the arguments about the impact of NAFTA and WTO on environmental controls, which seems to me -- speaking as an amateur -- like a more serious set of issues.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:50 AM | |

Kevin Drum asks [*], in connection with the claim that approving gay marriage would violate Biblical strictures, why the same Christians who cite Leviticus against homosexual conduct don't feel bound, for example, by the identically-worded prohibition against eating shellfish.

The orthodox Jewish viewpoint [*] is that the Law of Moses is binding on Jews, not on human beings as such. The purity code in Leviticus, and much of the rest of the law code laid out in the Torah and elaborated in the Talmud, is for the Children of Israel as "a holy people, a national of priests." Just as Brahmins are expected to keep themselves pure in a way not required of Hindus generally, Jews are supposed to follow lots of rules that do not apply to human beings generally. (Of course, in Judaism the hereditary priesthood, the Cohanim, live under an even more stringent set of rules.)

To me, that makes Halakha seem much more sensible than it would otherwise be; to have special rules marking out a special social function makes sense, while having the Creator of the Universe worrying about whether you eat pork makes no sense.

In the Jewish tradition, only the seven laws imposed on Noah at the Covenant of the Rainbow are said to be binding on all mankind. Those laws are said to be: (1) prohibition of blasphemy; (2) prohibition of idolatry; (3) prohibition of adultery and incest; (4) prohibition of murder; (5) prohibition of robbery (theft); (6) establishment of courts of justice; and (7) prohibition of the eating of flesh form a living animal, or the eating of blood.

That's a lot less restrictive than all that stuff in Leviticus, but still not generous enough to allow roast beef au jus: "Meat with the blood thereof shall ye not eat, for the blood thereof is the life thereof."

(The Lubavicher Hasidim and the Christian-Jewish movement called "Jews for Jesus" both have missionary efforts designed to encourage non-Jews to know and keep the Noachide Covenant.)

So even from the Halakhic perspective, it's pointless to criticize Christians as somehow inauthentic for not living like Jews. But by the same token, the attempt of the Christian right to pretend that the Bible somehow commands us to write selected portions of the Levitical purity code into our secular lawbooks is pretty obviously silly.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:15 AM | |

Last week's blackout was a much smaller disaster than it might have been. But there's no assurance that the next one won't be worse. Yet the Bush Administration and the Congressional Republicans, who for the last two years have been holding transmission-grid upgrades hostage to their pet proposals to drill for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve and subsidize utility companies to build nuclear power plants [*] have announced that they will continue that act of political blackmail, according to the Washington Times [*] (They're not alone, of course: Tom Daschle, still insisting on more wasteful, environmentally insane ethanol subsidies, also wants a "comprehensive" -- that is, log-rolled -- bill.)

Naturally, the Post-Modern President has no hesitation in saying that he's been pushing to upgrade the grid, not mentioning that he and his minions squelched a Democratic move to pass a separate transmission-upgrade bill in 2001.[*] And if the power goes out again, no doubt he will blame it on the Democrats for not submitting to his (or rather Dick Cheney's) extortion racket.

I'm strongly in favor of subsidies for nukes -- I'd rather pay the money than breathe the crap that comes out of a coal-fired power plant, and at the moment that's roughly the choice we face, and I regard the nuclear-waste issue as almost entirely imaginary -- and I don't actually give a hoot one way or another on ANWR, which is neither an important environmental issue nor a significant potential source of energy. But fixing the grid is a separatable issue, and holding it up to get leveage on unrelated matters, which might have seemed barely tolerable before last week, now looks just too crude for words.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:59 PM | |

Nora Volkow, the new director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, sounds very much like a scientist and very little like a drug-war propangandist in her interview with the New York Times. [*] She is even appropriately equivocal about the dangers of cannabis. Like many scientists who do brain imaging, she has what seems to me an excessively reductionist view of drug addiction, which she wants to treat as a phenomenon almost completely unconnected with more familiar instances of imperfect self-command. Still, the Bush Administration deserves major credit for not finding another Alan Leshner.

That Volkow turns out to be Trotsky's great-granddaughter simply proves that the universe is really much stranger than it has any good excuse for being.

Update What Kevin Drum sees [*] as an instance of communists infiltratiing our government could equally well be seen as something far more nefarious. Perhaps the Trotskyist element that was never far below the surface of Reagan-era neo-conservatism (the neo-cons tended to love Djilas's The New Class, which was fundamentally Troskyist in its analysis of the degeneration of Leninism into oligarchy) has begun, in the Bush era, to infect domestic policy as well. If a literary critic with a bias against Neruda's poems is put in charge of the National Institute for the Humanities we will know the Trots are back in force.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:06 AM | |

Good news: a quarter of the Americans who thought that Saudi Arabia was an "ally" or a "friendly" country in October of 2001 no longer think so. Bad news: that drop only brings the total down to 45%. That's more than the 38% who think that the Kingdom is "unfriendly" or an "enemy;" 17% don't know.[*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:56 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Far be it from me to defend Arianna Huffington. I have every reason to wish her campaign nothing but bad news:

1. Every vote she gets puts Arnold Schwarzenegger one vote closer to being Governor of California.

2. She's allied with the Greens, and had a joint press conference with Peter Cornejo, the Green candidate, and the execrable Ralph Nader. (She gets no credit for the delightful fact that Nader got a cake -- not, as previously reported, a pie -- in the face [*] at that press conference, as the cake was not a predictable results of her actions, but publicity for Nader's campaign to keep Bush in the White House for another term was.)

3. She's entitled to change her mind, but she at least owes us an explanation why she's gone from being the reputed brains behind a fairly extreme right-wing candidate for Senate and being herself a fairly extreme left-wing candidate for governor.

4. I've heard her speak and read her writings, and she appears to be an almost complete fool: Entertainment Tonight's version of an intellectual in politics.

So I'm not at all dismayed that Glenn Reynolds calls her "pretty much a complete, lying hypocrite" [*] based on this Matt Welch post [*].

Still, I'm not convinced that, in this particular case, the charge really sticks. Welch points out that, a week before her husband's defeat in the Senate race, she said:

One-eighty-seven is strictly about the anger and the frustration of taxpayers, who work extremely hard, often having two jobs in one family, to take care of their families, to take care of their children. And then, their hard-earned money is being used to pay for taxpayer services for illegal immigrants. This is at the heart of 187. And if you try to portray it in any other way, you're missing the point.

But last week she was singing a different tune:

HUFFINGTON: Well, because Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Bush Republican. He is going to back the Bush economic policies all the way. He is for the tax cuts. He has Pete Wilson, for heaven's sake, chairing his campaign committee.

I mean, how insensitive can you be? The man who introduced Proposition 187 about illegal immigration into California and the man who is despised by Latinos, the very people Schwarzenegger needs. So there is some kind of disconnect between the moderate image and the reality. Incidentally, Schwarzenegger himself was in favor of 187.

PAUL BEGALA: But now did you support Proposition 187? Because I know that your husband did when he was in the Congress. He was running for the Senate.

HUFFINGTON: Yes, my ex-husband did. I voted against it.

Welch doesn't provide any context, or a link, so I'm not sure what Huffington was actually saying in 1994. But it sure sounds as if she was talking about the politics of 187, and explaining why a bunch of decent people might vote for it, against the liberal presumption that they must all be a bunch of stone racists. The quote doesn't say, or clearly imply, that 187 was good public policy, or that she was going to vote for it. And surely she would have been justified in passing over in silence her disagreement with one of her husband's key political positions the week before an election in which he was a candidate.

That is, she might have then believed, and still believe, the following three propositions, without any inconsistency:

1. Prop. 187 was bad public policy.
2. It was offered by Pete Wilson and his friends in bad faith, as a way to exploit ethnic tensions.
3. Many of the people voting for it were voting their reasonable concerns; all pro-187 voters shouldn't be assumed to have shared the bad motives of its sponsors.

Nativism is an issue in American politics whenever immigration is high. Franklin and Jefferson were concerned about the Germans. The Know-Nothings were concerned about the Irish. The Californians were concerned about the Chinese and the Japanese. The Republicans and of the rural Democrats after World War I were concerned about the Jews and Italians and Poles. In each case, there were legitimate concerns about the impact of the newcomers on politics, on culture, on crime, and on wages. And in each case, it was possible to point out that the new immigrants were completely different from, and much more threatening than, the previous group. The Germans didn't even speak English. (Fifty years later, during another spike in immigration from Germany, Lincoln was spending money to subsidize German-language newspapers.) The Irish weren't even Protestant. The Chinese weren't even white. And the Jews were ... Jewish.

And often enough it's the recent immigrants who want to shut the door. [Amin and Ali come to New Jersey from Baghdad, and agree to a contest: the one who has become more Americanized after a year wins. When they meet twelve months later, Ali says to Amin: "I had to stop on the way to church this morning to drop my daughter and three of her friends at soccer practice; the SUV was big enough to hold all of them comfortably. On the way home from church, I went to the Sam's Club to pick up beer and burgers for the barbecue tonight. How's that for becoming American?" And Amin replies: "Up yours, raghead!"]

None of that tells me whether to be for or against tighter restrictions on immigration.

(It's obvious that we would be better off, at any given level of immigration, if more of it were legal and less of it illegal, which suggests that higher quotas and tougher enforcement against illegals might together be a dominant package over current policies, but even if that were true the deal is easier to make than it is to enforce, as the anti-immigrant forces learned after Simpson-Rodino was passed.)

But even if concern about immigration is reasonable, its political expression tends to be ugly, and sometimes gets very ugly indeed ("They...keep...coming!") You can be for tighter immigration restrictions and still think that Pete Wilson made a deliberate play to bigotry, and that anyone who presents himself as Wilson's political successor needs to come to account with that legacy. The fact that what Huffington says now about Schwarzenegger could legitimately have been said then about her husband isn't really on point.

So though I'm happy to have my friends on the right doing my work for me by helping Arianna self-destruct, in this particular case I'm not sure they have the goods on her.

Do keep trying, though.

Update Matt Welch points out that he accused Ms. Huffington only of inconsitency, eschewing the stronger language used by Glenn Reynolds. And today he has another pair of duelling Huffingtonisms [*], which are more blatantly inconsistent than the previous set. For the record, he also disclaims being part of "the right." I stand corrected.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:51 PM | |

David Corn continues to follow the Valerie Plame story [*], though like the rest of us he struggles with the fact that he doesn't really have anything fresh to report. The reason stonewalling is sometimes such a good strategy is that shutting off the flow of news shuts of the flow of news stories.

That's the challenge for those of us who would like to see whoever outed Valerie Plame punished: to create newsworthy events, and to keep writing and talking about the story even when there's nothing new to say. Note that the complete absence of any defense by the pro-Bush forces -- no one is arguing in print either that they didn't do it or that doing it was somehow justifiable -- works toward their basic objective, which is to have everyone forget about it.

I have to admire the capacity of the right wing to maintain silence when anything they say would only make things worse for themselves, and to keep making noise about the misconduct of liberals even when there's nothing new to talk about.

Corn does have one actual item of new (at least new to me) information: He describes in some detail the process by which investigations in such cases go forward, giving great prominence to the discretion given to the Director of Central Intelligence over whether to refer the matter to the Justice Department.

That being the case, George Tenet needs to feel pressure from people he respects. It's a little puzzling to me why we aren't hearing more public outrage from retired CIA officers and from the larger world of people not in the government, or no longer in the government, with credentials to make a fuss about what seems to have been an illegal, politically-inspired act damaging to the national security.

I'm thinking about people like Sam Nunn, Warren Rudman, Stansfield Turner, Anthony Zinni, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and William Cohen. (James Woolsey ought to be speaking out, but he's too busy preaching World War IV and hoping he can talk Bush into fighting it.) But there's also a semi-official CIA alumni group. So far, the only prominent folks who have spoken out have been those with partisan reasons for doing so. If that doesn't change, it's likely that Team Bush will be able to bury this scandal.

Summary here. Breaking news here: Wilson fingers Rove.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:12 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Today's Boston Globe has an op-ed [*] by Lester Grinspoon, a fervent advocate of the medical use of cannabis. He reports enthusiastically that professional opinion is swinging his way:

IN A RECENT poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine. That's a big change from the attitude in the medical community a decade ago, when few health providers believed (or would acknowledge) that cannabis had any medical utility. [snip] The dramatic change of view is the result of clinical experience

The numbers sound impressive, though you have to wonder how Dr. Grinspoon knows that the change in attitudes he believes he sees came from "clinical experience" rather than from reading the newspapers. Surely it can't be the case that three-quarters of American physicians have personally recommended what remains, after all, an illegal remedy.

As it turns out, though, the question of what caused medical opinion on this topic to change doesn't even arise, because Dr. Grinspoon provides no evidence whatever that opinion has, in fact, changed.

It turns out that the "poll" Dr. Grinspoon cites [*] is one of those on-line surveys websites use to build their traffic. The "sample" consists merely of whoever heard about the poll and bothered to answer. So all we really know is that of the 6500 people who found the site and decided to vote, 5500 voted "yes." About the opinion of physicians or health-care providers overall, the Medscape pseudo-survey tells us exactly nothing.

In any case, clinical opinion, even when it is carefully gathered [*], is no substitute for clinical research.

Advocates of the medical use of cannabis insist that the almost complete absence experimental data on their pet remedy results entirely from the unwillingness of the federal government to allow research to go forward, but that doesn't explain why there's also no published research from any of the many countries (The Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, the UK, Germany, Spain) with active medical-research traditions and governments far less caught up in "Reefer Madness" ideology than ours.

Politically, "medical marijuana" is a great issue for the anti-drug-war forces, one of the very few questions on which the public sympathizes with the legalizers rather than the drug warriors. That helps explain why so much of the effort of the medical marijuana advocates has gone into litigation, legislation, and referenda, and so little into the medical research that quite probably would result in making cannabis a legal medicine again in the space of a few years for an expenditure of a few million dollars.

And in fact Dr. Grinspoon concludes his article by saying that making marijuana available as a medicine is not his preferred outcome: he argues that to take full advantage of its medical benefits, one would have to legalize the drug completely, for "recreational" as well as medical purposes.

My non-specialist view, based on reading the literature, is that inhaling the vapor of crude cannabis is probably useful for a substantial number of patients and highly useful for a smaller number, and that oral administration of pure delta-9 THC, which is currently legal, is on average less useful and carries with it more severe side-effects, in particular anxiety and dysphoric intoxication. My better-informed view as a student of drug policy is that making whole cannabis a legal medicine again would have roughly no impact on the number of people who wind up suffering from cannabis abuse or dependency disorder.

As to non-medical use, cannabis is a much bigger problem than most of my boomer age-mates think it is, with about one in eleven of all those who use it more than experimentally spending some months as heavy daily users. That makes me afraid of the sort of commercialized legalization that would turn cannabis into another drug like alcohol or tobacco, with highly-paid marketing executives doing their level best to create and maintain as many addicts as possible. So my own preference would be for a "grow your own" policy, making cannabis legal to possess or produce, but not to sell. That wouldn't prevent sale, but it would prevent commercial marketing.

But whether you're for or against legalizing cannabis as a medicine, and whether you're for or against legalizing it in some form as a recreational drug, you should be against misrepresentation, which both the drug warriors [*] and the drug law reformers [*]practice with dismaying frequency.

Any claim about what American physicians think based on an on-line "poll" is an insult to the intelligence of the reader, and I for one resent it. Dr. Grinspoon and the editors of the Globe should know better.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:30 PM | |

I continue to get email from supporters of Charles Colson, who keep explaining to me (clearly I'm a slow learner) that it's perfectly OK to define the "graduation" requirements of a program to include lots of accomplishments that strongly correlate with not committing any more crimes, and then use the fact that "graduates," so defined, don't commit many crimes as evidence that the program was a success.

If so, then I have great news to report. I have developed a low-cost program that is 100% guaranteed to reduce recidivism.

Here's the program: We'll take a group of people getting out of prison and instruct them (1) to take a Vitamin E capsule every day and (2) not to commit any crimes. We'll call those who follow the instructions for two years (they tell us they're taking their vitamins, and that they haven't committed any crimes, and they haven't been arrested) "graduates," and the others (the group consisting of anyone who says he's stopped taking his vitamins, or admits committing a crime, or has been arrested) "dropouts." Then we'll follow the graduates, and the control group, for another year, and see which group gets arrested and re-imprisoned more often.

Bet you anything you like that our graduates do better than random, better even than the graduates of IFI. Because Vitamin E and a warning to stay out of trouble constitutes an effective program? No. Because not getting arrested for two years is a very good predictor of not getting arrested in the third year, just as holding a job and belonging to a church are very good predictors of not getting arrested.

How would we know that the Vitamin E cure was "working" merely through selection effects, rather than having some real impact? Because we would find that the dropout group had a much higher reoffense rate than the controls, just like the dropout group in the IFI study. That's the telltale sign of "cherry-picking."

And that's why an honest evaluation has to follow the drop-outs as well as the graduates. It's not that we expect the drop-outs to improve; but when we find that the dropout group actually does worse than the control group, then we have to ask whether some or all of the reported difference between graduates and controls reflected selection effects rather than any actual impact of the program.

Previous post, with links, here. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:31 AM | |
Thread: Crime Control

The Field Poll, which is the gold standard in California, breaks with other polls and with the conventional wisdom, showing Bustamante ahead of Schwarzenegger, 25-23 [*]. Simon. McClintock, and Ueberroth are taking substantial bites out of Schwarzenegger's hide, while Huffington and Cornejo are taking only small bites out of Bustamante's.

Bustamente's lead isn't much, given the likely fluidity of the race 14% undecided and the big error bands that come from a sample size under 500. But a celibrity candidate like Schwarzenegger is likely to peak when he announces, and lose votes as he has to take stands on actual issues.

Moreover, if Field is right, Bustamante holds that lead despite not having anything like a lock on the Latino vote: he's leading A.S. by only 44-22. I'd expect some of the Latino vote to "come home" when it gets to be obvious to everyone that California might be about to have its first Spanish-surnamed governor since General Fremont rode through.

The poll reinforces my initial belief that Ueberroth, who would probably be my all-things-considered personal choice for governor from the field we now have, is never going to be a serious factor. (I suppose that might change if some of Schwarzenegger's high-profile backers such as Riordan and Buffet were to peel off and switch to Ueberroth, but even then I'd guess that he'd simply wind up a more powerful spoiler. The White House is clearly backing Schwarzenegger, and there just aren't enough Republican votes to go around.)

This may be another case where the electorate is actually less childish and attention-deficient than the media. I'd be delighted if Bill Schneider, who certainly ought to have known better, winds up eating his rather nihilistic words.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:19 PM | |

I wondered what Warren Buffet, who's supposed to be a smart guy who believes in the right things, thought he was doing endorsing Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor. Now I really wonder what he thought he was doing.

Buffet told the Wall Street Journal that part of California's fiscal problem is Proposition 13, which forces it to under-rely on property taxes. That, of course, is correct. (Remember Kinsley's definition of a political gaffe: It's when someone in politics accidentally tells the truth.)

If the counties and cities were getting their cut of California's inflated property values, the state wouldn't have to send so much of its revenue back down the line. Unlike the businesses and the high earners who can leave California when the tax burden gets too high, the coastline isn't going anywhere.

Even if the voters insist on giving homeowners a break (and those who bought their houses cheap, plus their descendents, an extra-special break) we could at least start to get something reasonable from the owners of commercial and industrial property. (I speak as the owner of an absurdly overpriced home and therefore as one who would be a big loser, in purely financial terms, if Prop. 13 were replealed.)

That's one of the advantages of having an occasional fiscal crisis: it forces issues such as this one on to the table.

Naturally, the other candidates, including Simon and Davis, immediately went into full demagogue mode. And naturally, Schwarzenegger's campaign is backing off. * (Apparently Aaaaaaanuld is just a couturier's dummy: his job is to shut up and make the clothes look good.)

So now Buffet has an interesting problem. Does he still want to be part of Schwarzenegger's front?

Update The Field Poll [*], which is the gold standard in California, breaks with other polls and with the conventional wisdom, showing Bustamante ahead of Schwarzenegger, 25-23. Simon and McClintock are taking substantial bites out of Schwarzenegger's hide, while Huffington and Cornejo are taking only small bites out of Bustamante's.

This may be another case where the electorate is actually less childish and attention-deficient than the media.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:16 PM | |

John Dean, in his column at FindLaw *, gives a thorough analysis of the Plame affair and the relevant law. He argues that the Espionage Act of 1917 would apply, and cites the Morrison case (an analyst went to prison for selling three classified photographs to a magazine, even though there was no evidence that he had any intention to damage the national security) as precedent. Dean also notes that a low-level CIA clerk spent two years in prison under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which almost certainly applies to the facts of the Plame case, for something she told her boyfriend.

The bottom line: Dean thinks that the Plame Affair, and the insouciance with which the White House is treating it, reflect a more-than-Nixonian depth of depravity.

Thread starts here. My summary here.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:53 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

The "Texas miracle" in education, Governor Bush's implausible account of which the media never bothered to scrutinize when he was running for President, turns out to be based largely on hocused numbers.

In particular, Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent whom Bush promoted to Secretary of Education and who was the chief saleman for "No Child Left Behind," turns out to have taken a long summer vacation either from his ethics or from his common sense. He purported to believe, and paid bonuses based on, numbers showing that one high-poverty high school after another had zero dropouts. *

Since every school has dropouts, any large school that reports zero dropouts is reporting what must be untrue. Yet the Houston authorities never queried the numbers, and took predictable revenge on the assistant principal who blew the whistle. (He was assigned to no job in a windowless office, is now second deputy principal at a primary school, and expects to be fired in January: his contract, like all the others, allows dismissal without cause. Remember, we need to get rid of all those pesky civil service job protections if we're going to make government work.)

Now that the truth is out, Paige, instead of expressing outrage, blandly refers all questions back to Houston. I wonder how much of what he said about his Houston record at his confirmation hearing and in congressional testimony about No Child Left Behind he demonstrably knew to be false?

I can't pretend to be surprised; after all, this is just another instance of Dukenfield's Law of Incentive Management, which holds that, since anything worth winning is worth cheating for, an incentive to "peform" is also an incentive to rig the count. But you don't have to be surprised to be outraged, if not by the fact of cheating by its blatancy and the evident indifference to it of the folks in Houston and Washington who sold the whole country a new education policy based in substantial part on obvious hogwash.

Footnote: Boy, am I ever glad that Howell Raines is no longer editing the New York Times! Under his shrill, partisan regime, this might have run on the front page rather than in the middle of Page 19.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:34 PM | |

Can anyone wiser than I in the way of Pyra tell me how to add "A Fair and Balanced Weblog" to the title above?

Update Done! Thanks to those who helped.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:32 AM | |

Charles Colson pretends to misunderstand * my criticism in Slate * of his claim that his Bible-centered prison program reduced recidivism. In that essay, and in a follow-up published in this space * several days before Colson's response, I pointed out that studying only the successful completers of a program does not allow a valid inference that the program actually worked, as opposed to merely "cherry-picking" those who would have succeeded anyway.

The methodological point, though a little complex when explained in words, is no more controversial among those who do empirical social science than the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun is controversial among astronomers.

I am reasonably hopeful that anyone who carefully reads what I had to say will follow its logic and not need to rely on any external authority. Anyone with the energy to do so can look up "selection effects" in the index of any textbook on social-science research methods. The fact that Colson dances around is that the dropouts from IFI did much worse than the control group. If the graduates had done better than the controls, and the dropouts no worse, then it would be reasonable to interpret the gains among the graduates to the effects of the program. But unless IFI somehow damaged the people who started it but did not complete it, then the fact that the non-graduates did much worse, and the group as a whole no better, than the controls suggests that a selection effect was at work: the program screened out the bad risks, making the graduates look artificially good.

[Another issue I didn't raise before becomes relevant because of Mr. Colson's assertion that IFI rescued chronic recidivists from lives of crime. The return-to-prison rate among the control group was only 20%, compared to the 50-60% found in most studies of prison releasees. That's consistent with the screening criteria, which called for prisoners who were otherwise assigned to minimum security. Obviously, this was a fairly light-duty group of offenders in the first place.]

But the technical details of this sort of argument are always frustrating for non-experts to try to follow. After all, at first blush, both Colson's verbal formulation of the problem (No program works for those who don't stick with it, so studying those who complete the program is not only legitimate but virtually inevitable) and mine (A prison program that counts only those who get jobs as having "completed" it will always look good, because getting a job is a good predictor of staying out of trouble, so you can't tell from studying completers only whether the program actually worked) seem perfectly reasonable.

Those too rushed to try to wrap their heads around the mathematics of selection bias might want to consider some of the external evidence that suggests that, in this instance, one ought to believe me and not Mr. Colson (other than the fact that his response never addresses my careful analysis of the methodological point):

1. This is what I do for a living, and getting it wrong would be a professional disgrace. Mr. Colson's occupation does not involve expertise in empirical methods.

2. Mr. Colson mentions a study * by Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania. But, although Dr. Johnson's study was paid for by Colson's organization, Mr. Colson does not quote Dr. Johnson as agreeing with him or disagreeing with me on the issue on which we differ. Indeed, the claim that the Prison Fellowship made, and that I criticized, is not made in Dr. Johnson's study. (Nor has Dr. Johnson responded to my inquiries on the subject, which started more than a month ago.)

3. My essay in Slate quoted John DiIulio, a former board member of Mr. Colson's organization and the founder of the center at Penn where Dr. Johnson's study was done, as agreeing that the results Dr. Johnson reports do not support the claim Mr. Colson makes, though Prof. DiIulio adds that no one study can show conclusively that a program worked or didn't work. Surely Mr. Colson doesn't doubt that Prof. DiIulio (who has been tenured at both Princeton and Penn) understands the research question involved, and presumably he wouldn't include Prof. DiIulio -- who ran the White House faith-based programs office at the beginning of the current administration -- with me in his category of "people whose objective is to score points against the President."

4. I can also report -- though perhaps Mr. Colson would disbelieve me -- that of the large volume of email I received after my essay was published, the tiny fraction that came from people with professional training in the social sciences was uniformly supportive. (One correspondent, a teacher, said that he planned to use my essay as a case study for a course in research methods.)

5. Moreover, while the contents of my email in-box are not publicly verifiable, the contents of the Blogosphere are. Slate is widely read among bloggers, and several, including Eugene Volokh * and Kevin Drum, linked to it. That means that many people competent to criticize my analysis were aware of it. I would almost certainly know if any criticism had been posted, and as far as I am aware none has been.

A number of my correspondents asserted that concentrating on the statistics ignores the human element, and the spiritual element, of the process of conversion. No doubt that is true. But the claim made by Mr. Colson's group, and by the White House, was that the analysis done at Penn had statistically demonstrated the efficacy of IFI in reducing recidivism. My essay addressed the merits of that claim, and not the very different question of the value of Christian missionary efforts, whether in prison or elsewhere. Having made a claim about what the numbers show, Mr. Colson can reasonably be held to scientific and not faith-based standards of evidence.

Therefore I claim that an unbiased observer ought to believe that, in this instance, I am right and Mr. Colson wrong. And if so, then Mr. Colson must now be engaging in deliberate deception, though he might not have been when his organization first claimed statistical "success" for its program. Once his claim had been challenged, Mr. Colson could have known the truth of the matter, if he wanted to, by asking people he knows and trusts who are competent to judge.

It should not be neccessary to remind Mr. Colson that both knowing the truth and speaking the truth are activities highly spoken of in Scripture.

Update I announce my low-cost, guaranteed-to-work recidivism-prevention program. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:42 AM | |
Thread: Crime Control

John Hawkins at Right-Wing News * ran an interesting pair of polls. He asked a group of right-wing bloggers and a group of left-wing bloggers to name the worst twenty figures in American history (not in order) and then counted the votes.

Below is the "left" list, followed by the "right" list.

My own list, as submitted (again, this isn't in any particular order):

J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Roger Brooke Taney, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Richard Nixon, John Wilkes Booth, A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson, William Randolph Hearst, George W. Bush, Theodore Bilbo, Preston Brooks, Huey Newton, Richard Mellon Scaife, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, James Earl Ray, Strom Thurmond.

On reflection, I think I should have included Andrew Jackson (for the Trail of Tears) and John C. Calhoun, and perhaps Wallace rather than Thurmond. Polk and Buchanan perhaps also belonged on the list, Polk for the Mexican War and Buchanan for failing to take the obvious military steps necessary to prevent secession.

As Matthew Yglesias notes, all the lists are hopelessly telescoped in time; Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, for example, look important only in a (temporally) very myopic view.

Perhaps because the lists were gathered in a political context from political people, the political is allowed to outweigh the merely criminal; Jim Jones doesn't make anyone's list, for example, nor does Al Capone (an omission I regret).

Unsurprisingly, the left is tougher on rebels and related racists, while the right is tougher on the ideological friends of the USSR (Ames, who sold out for money, is about equally despised by left and right). I would surely have listed Kim Philby had he been an American; I left off Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss because I don't see that either of them did much in the way of actual damage. Matthew Yglesias wonders what Nathan Bedford Forrest is doing outranking Jefferson Davis; my answer would be that the introduction of systematic and successful terrorism into American politics was a worse action than mere rebellion, even rebellion in a thoroughly bad cause.

It's worth noting that the left seems to have forgiven Hoover and Coolidge, while the right still hates FDR. That Noam Chomsky outranks John Wilkes Booth or James Earl Ray in the Right's demonology says, I would submit, something strange about the Right. On the other hand, what's a footnote-to-a-footnote like George Lincoln Rockwell doing on the Left list? It's not as if he'd been a traitor during WWII. He's not as silly a choice as Michael Moore (!), but he can't possibly belong on the list of the 200 most evil Americans, let alone 20.

Violence in council seems to have been higher on my list of sins than was common on either side of the aisle. I'm a little surprised that Brother Huey, who brought armed men the floor of the California Assembly, didn't hit either consensus list. I'm less surprised not to have much company in naming Preston Brooks for his armed assault on Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.

A fundamental change in the meaning of "left" and "right" shows up in the absence of both corporate and union figures from the lists (aside from Hearst, who is really there as a political figure rather than as an entrepreneur). A generation ago, such lists would probably have included some of the great figures from the union/management wars.

Political corruption shows up only in the person of Boss Tweed; I thought about including Mark Hanna, but decided to pass because I don't really know the rights and wrongs of his career.

As I wrote to Hawkins when I submitted my list, part of the reason for the telescoping is mere ignorance. I'm sure that there should be a major slave trader on my list, but I don't know the name of one. I knew also that someone involved in slaughering Indians belonged there, but (having forgotten Andrew Jackson's little exercise in genocide) I couldn't come up with a name for that category either.

As a Rorschach test, this was an interesting exercise. In the end, though, I'm not sure the question posed made it possible to frame an answer using anything like coherent criteria.

The Left list (working from the bottom up):

Boss Tweed (5), Roger Taney (5), James Earl Ray (5), Charles Manson (5), Rush Limbaugh (5), Jerry Falwell (5), Roy Cohn (5), Dick Cheney (5), John C. Calhoun (5)

20) The Rosenbergs (3) + Julius Rosenberg (3) (6 total votes)
20) Pat Robertson (6)
20) Oliver North (6)
20) William Randolph Hearst (6)
20) Aaron Burr (6)
20) Aldrich Ames (6)
18) George Lincoln Rockwell (7)
18) Robert McNamara (7)
14) Richard Mellon Scaife (8)
14) Lee Harvey Oswald (8)
14) Charles Coughlin (8)
14) Strom Thurmond (8)
13) Ronald Reagan (9)
12) George Wallace (10)
11) Andrew Jackson (12)
9) Jefferson Davis (13)
9) George W. Bush (13)
6) Benedict Arnold (14)
6) Henry Kissinger (14)
6) John Wilkes Booth (14)
3) Timothy McVeigh (16)
3) Nathan Bedford Forrest (16)
3) J. Edgar Hoover (16)
2) Richard Nixon (25)
1) Joseph McCarthy (26)

The Right list:

Ted Bundy (5), Jane Fonda (5), John Wayne Gacy (5), John Walker Lindh (5), Joe McCarthy (5), Michael Moore (5), Boss Tweed (5)

17) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (6)
17) John Walker (6)
17) Lee Harvey Oswald (6)
17) Robert Byrd (6)
16) Aldrich Ames (7)
14) Richard Nixon (8)
14) Aaron Burr (8)
12) Al Sharpton (9)
12) Charles Manson (9)
8) Timothy McVeigh (10)
8) Lyndon Johnson (10)
8) Hillary Clinton (10)
8) John Wilkes Booth (10)
7) Alger Hiss (12)
6) Noam Chomsky (13)
4) Jesse Jackson (14)
4) Jimmy Carter (14)
3) Bill Clinton (15)
2) Benedict Arnold (19)
1) The Rosenbergs (15) & Julius Rosenberg (5) (20 total votes)

Update Thanks to the the reader who pointed out the misspelling of "secession," which has been corrected. Another reader suggests Sirhan Sirhan, who failed to qualify by reason of nationality. A third makes an interesting pair of nominations: Harry Anslinger, for inventing the war on drugs, and Timothy Leary, for confusing people about the relationship between the clear light of the void and a party.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:02 PM | |

Tapped * says two things I agree with: that Wesley Clark would be a good addition to the Democratic field, and that all the Democratic candidates have to start walking their talk on security issues. You can't convince people you're serious about it unless some of the folks around you actually know something. I'd rather talk domestic policy, too -- that's what I do for a living. But the Democrats can't contend for power without looking as if they're comfortable dealing with national security; and they can't look comfortable without being comfortable.

Vietnam was a long time ago; get over it.

By the same token, opposition to "corporate interests" went out, or should have gone out, with bell-bottoms. The question of what to do publicly and what to do privately -- how much of the GDP should be at the direction of the political system -- is an important question, and deeply linked, though not identical, with the question of income redistribution. Those are things worth fighting about.

But the question of how much public work to accomplish by buying it from contractors rather than hiring civil servants is a separate question, and mostly a technical one. The interests of the public employees (and their unions) are not the same as the interests of the public. Yes, contracting-out can be a form of patronage, and whether politically-connected, or merely poorly-supervised, contractors are chiselling the public is always a legitimate issue to raise.

Tapped embraces * Paul Krugman's not very impressive column * on the subject of military contracting. Phil Carter, who speaks from experience, demonstrates * to my satisfaction that Krugman is, in this case, talking through his hat.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:52 PM | |
Thread: Wesley Clark

Beldar, a blogger who is also a practicing lawyer, defends Jamie Gorelick's service on the 9-11 Commission (here and here) as creating only a de minimus conflict with her firm's representation of a Saudi prince accused of having helped finance and organize the massacre. He is confident that "Chinese Wall" procedures will keep anything Gorelick learns as a Commission member from leaking to whichever of her partners are defending the prince, and observes correctly that the contribution of the case to Ms. Gorelick's personal finances isn't going to be very large. His posts are worth reading as a clear exposition of the ethical rules pertaining to conflict, as lawyers deal with that issue.

But Beldar's analysis leaves in place the fact that Gorelick is in a position, as a commission member, to directly and significantly help or harm her partner's client's case. As Beldar points out, the same is likely to be true of any Washington lawyer with enough stature to serve on the 9-11 Commission. But that's exactly the point that Dwight Meredith *, Glenn Reynolds *, and I * (along, as Dwight notes, with most of the left blogosphere, which doesn't seem nearly as indifferent to scandals involving Democrats as the right blogosphere is to scandals involving Republicans) have been making: the world of the big Washington (and national) law firms, whose denizens are, collectively, a major force in American public life, is intolerably permeated with Saudi money.

When Saudi Arabia was merely one of the many nasty third-world tyrannies with which the United States does business, and the leader of the OPEC conspiracy to expropriate the world's oil consumers, that was merely objectionable. But now, when -- as I believe -- Saudi Arabia is actually waging undeclared war on the United States, its penetration of our power centers constitutes a significant national problem.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:55 AM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

*

Is it utterly impossible to give the Bush Administration any extraordinary power to strengthen its hand against terrorism without having that power used instead for political advantage? There seems to be reason to doubt it. It turns out * that Bush & Co. -- in this case, the Transportation Security Agency, over which Bush insisted he needed extraordinary personnel powers -- will even threaten to use powers it doesn't have to punish those who displease it.

The Administration threatening to employ the extraordinarily intrusive investigations permitted under the Patriot Act to figure out which Air marshals complained to the press about leaving key flights unprotected. (No, it turns out that the Patriot Act doesn't permit such investigations in these circumstances, but that doesn't mean that the threat is without its intimidating effect.) This is the very same administration that seems so strangely uninterested in finding out which of its senior officials burned a covert CIA operative. *

Remember the fight last fall about whether to strip Homeland Security employees of civil service protection in the name of efficiency? Remember how the chickenhawks successfully questioned Max Cleland's courage because he stood up to them on that issue? This is why that battle was worth fighting.

[Thanks to The Likely Story for the lead.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 07:19 PM | |

A reader who is also a member of one of the big law firms I excoriated for taking Saudi money * points out that both my current employer, the University of California, and my former employer, Harvard, have accepted of the Kingdom's bounty for professorial chairs. He wants to know what I think about that.

Three answers:

1. I'm against it.
2. It isn't the same.
3. If it happens again, I want to know about it so I can make a fuss.

That I'm against it should go without saying. People who give you money have influence over you. No one should voluntarily put himself in the position where the enemies of his country can influence him.

As it happens, some months ago a close friend who is also a highly distinguished professor with a needy research enterprise had an opportunity to raise Very Big Bucks from Saudi Arabia. He asked me what I thought about it, and I strongly advised him not to go that way, despite my regard for the importance of the work he and his group do.

That the Harvard and UC cases aren't the same as the Baker Botts and Jones Day cases is true on two levels.

First, a university's norms and processes are all about independence, while the lawyer-client relationship is based on the lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy. In particular, a university can and should take money from people on both sides of most disputed issues, while the conflict-of-interest rules mean that a lawyer who takes a retainer from one party can't represent the other party, even in a different action.

Second, disloyalty, like its relative, treason, sometimes is what Talleyrand said it was: a matter of dates. Taking Saudi money before 9-11 (or before the public record contained what it now contains in the way of evidence of Saudi complicity in 9-11) was not the same thing as taking that money today. Unlike the retainers I criticized, the UC and Harvard transactions were both pre-9-11.

I didn't like those deals when they happened; the Kingdom has done, and continues to do, enough nasty things other than financing al-Qaeda to make it worthy of sustained criticism, and taking its money must tend to reduce the volume and severity of the criticism it gets. Moreover, American universities employ substantial numbers of Jews, and the Kingdom is openly and consistently anti-Semitic.

Surely it is not far-fetched to suspect that a country that, as a matter of law, does not grant visas to Jews will, as a donor, tend to make the places to which it gives money less hospitable to the people it hates and despises. ("C'mon, Jim. Can we really afford to have a Director of Development named Katzenberg? How far is that going to get with Prince Bandar?")

Be that as it may, now that we know that the Saudi government has waged, and is waging, war on the United States, it would be in my view utterly despicable for any university to take Saudi money, or to provide the usual quid pro quos in the form of named chairs, named buildings, named programs, or honorary degrees. I'd be happy to help publicize any incidents of such academic prostitution that come to my attention.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:59 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Adam at The Likely Story finds another explosive-if-accurate item, this one in the Independent *: apparently the British intelligence that was supposed to back up the claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake in Africa -- the stuff the Brits were "standing behind," allowing Bush to make the claim that "Britsh intelligence has learned" about a purchase attempt after the documents we got from Italy purporting to demonstrate such an attempt turned out to be bogus -- was based on another forgery.

If true, this raises the question: who had the motive, means, and opportunity to put out all these spoof documents about uranium from Niger? Offhand, I can't come up with a plausible answer.

Update The WaPo -- which, as Atrios notes, is becoming like the Wall Street Journal, with conservative editorials almost completely out of touch with the facts reported in its news columns -- has a long, well-reported, non-conspiratorial story * about the process by which the WMD theat from Iraq was exaggerated.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:47 AM | |

Adam at The Likely Story -- a fine weblog which had escaped my attention but which joins the blogroll forthwith -- finds two new mass-media references to the Plame affair, one of them with potentially important news.

The editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer * calls the affair "a cancer somewhere in the Bush Administration" (echoing the language John Dean used about the Watergate cover-up) and call for an investigation. (Adam doesn't mention a similar editorial in the Berkshire Eagle *. That should give the Tanglewood audience something to talk about during intermission.)

David Ballingrud in the St. Petersburg Times * reports that Joseph Wilson "thinks he knows" the identities of the people who unmasked his wife, but isn't ready "yet" to name them, hoping that an FBI or Congressional investigation will bring them to light. Adam at The Likely Story takes that to be a threat that Wilson will make a public accusation if there is no investigation or only a perfunctory one.

One again, real reporting and tough commentary on this affair are coming out in secondary news outlets, not as dependent on leaks and with less to lose in terms of access to important officials than the major dailies or newsmagazines.

Any reporter or Senate staffer who wants to know whether the FBI or anyone else is actually looking in to this matter now has an easy way to find out. A Google News search for "Joseph C. Wilson" pops up the Ballingrud story. Anyone investigating the matter with any sort of diligence would find that story, and ask Wilson who he thinks the bad guys are. So call Wilson this Friday and see if he's had a phone call or a visit. If not, you know what to do next.

Yesterday, I was somewhat discouraged: without major media coverage, I didn't see how minority Senators could force any real investigation. Now I think this matter won't be allowed to die.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:50 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Today we discovered that the trailers found in Iraq that the president claims were used to produce weapons of mass destruction were actually being used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. The American people need to have confidence that our president will tell us the truth. It seems George Bush is finding it increasingly difficult to either tell the truth, or listen to the truth tellers. It is a shame we are still trying to find reasons to justify why we took our focus off of Al Qaeda and ‘Osama bin Forgotten.’ The American people expect and deserve to be given honest answers to their questions. If George Bush can’t trust the American people with the truth, how can the American people trust him with the White House?

--Senator Bob Graham *

[Factual backup here * ]
Could someone explain to me in words one syllable why Bob Graham doesn't count as a top-tier candidate? He's spent a political lifetime building a liberal record and getting elected and elected and re-elected in Florida -- in part, apparently, because he turned out to be a first-rate administrator when he was Governor -- and he makes the case against Bush on security grounds better than anyone else in the field.

Do you think the country is really going to mind that the guy is an obsessive diary-keeper? If that habit freaks you out personally, try thinking of it as a mindfulness practice.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:28 PM | |

Well, at least Schwarzenegger has guts. Asked for his view on the gay-marriage issue, he boldly proclaimed: "I don't want to get into that right now." * [Looks as if he's going to try to duck releasing his tax returns, too.]

He continues to propose spending more money on education and not raising taxes while closing a budget gap in the tens-of-billions range by attracting more business to the state (presumably using magic, or special effects, since he doesn't say how he will do it, other than by providing "leadership").

This combination of political courage and fiscal prudence has gained him endorsements from George W. Bush and Gary Coleman.

In other news: Ueberroth is in, which I think is probably good for Schwarzenegger, since Ueberroth with help split the numerate vote. On the other hand, Simon is apparently in -- at least, that's what his PR people told Bloomberg News * -- which is certainly bad for Schwarzenegger. Simon can self-finance and will peel off some right-wing anti-Davis vote.

The LA Times reports that early polls show A.S. with about a quarter of the vote, and show that Bustamante trails A.S. by about the margin of the Garamendi supporters. *

It's a tough situation for the Democrats. There are obvious advantages to a Latino candidate, but as far as I can tell everyone agrees that Bustamante is far from the brightest bulb on the tree. He apparently plans to finance his campaign by selling out to the tribes on casino issues. His one big accomplishment in the legislature was to insist that the University of California open a ninth campus at Merced, a dreary town in the Central Valley (Bustamante's home base) whose location alone guarantees it medicority before it opens its doors. Given that UC was already in fairly bad fiscal shape even before the budget crunch, this was a fairly reckless act of vandalism.

So there are strong reasons to think that Garamendi would make a much better governor. But there isn't much reason to think that Garamendi can be elected (assuming that two Democrats stay in the race) while Bustamante might be.

The good news for me is that the Fingernail Diet is supposed to just melt those extra pounds away.

Update Actually, if Ueberroth could be elected, he probably wouldn't be a bad governor. His not being a Democrat wouldn't bother me much, under the circumstances. But I don't see how he pulls it off, with Riordan endorsing Schwarzenegger despite having Aaaaaahnold's dagger still in his back.

Second update, Saturday evening Not such a bad day. Garamendi is out, which is good for Bustamante; Simon is in, which is bad for Schwarzenegger. The WaPo thinks Ueberroth will split the moderate-Republican vote with Schwarzenegger, rather than splitting the grown-up vote with Bustamente. Huffington is a wildcard; bad for Bustamante, but only if she gains traction. I've always thought of her as mostly a joke, but I can't be sure that the hardcore crunchy-granolas will see her the way I do.

Still, with four non-trivial Republicans in the race (AS, Ueberroth, Simon, and McClintock) and only two non-trivial Democrats (Bustamante and Huffington) this could well be doable. There's one more subtlety I hadn't considered: Ward Connerly's initiative to forbid the state to collect ethnic data will be on the ballot at the same time, and the Davis forces are expected to raise money against it as a way of evading campaign contribution limitations and pulling out the African-American and Latino vote. That may help Bustamante, and it will certainly hurt the Connerly initiative, which in my view is a thoroughly obscurantist and pernicious measure. However, with Bustamante in the race, I'm not sure that Latinos are going to vote to keep Davis in office, and that may limit how much energy Davis wants to put into the anti-Connerly cause.

Yesterday, faced with what seemed like the probability that dumping Davis would main getting Schwarzenegger instead, I was facing the grim prospect of voting against the recall. Now that seems much less likely to be necessary. Certainly if my choice is Bustamante or Davis, I want Bustamante; I'd rather have a governor owned by the tribal gambling interests than by the prison guards' union. And I can't agree that setting the precedent that a governor who doe a sufficiently rotten job get the boot is obviously a bad thing. Still and all, it's a pretty sad set of choices.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:15 PM | |

Are the neocons really crazy enough to want to replay Iran-Contra?

Apparently so, according the the Sydney Morning Herald * Doug Feith's office is reaching out to the middleman in the arms-for-hostages deal to get him involved in a plan to overthrow the mullahs, and some unnamed official (presumably at State?) has blown the whistle.

Recycling is good (sometimes) for aluminium cans, but almost invariably bad for old scandals.

[Thanks to MaxSpeak for the pointer.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:37 AM | |

CBS finds a forty-year old Holy Office document concerning the process by which priests accused of abusing their role as confessors for sexual advantage are to be handled ecclesiastically. *. Everyone involved in the case, including the accuser, is to be bound by a perpetual oath of secrecy under pain of excommunication.

CBS posts on its website hard-to-read .pdfs of the document, Crimen Sollicitationis in Engish * and Latin *.

The church defends itself from the accusation that the document, which apparently was in force as recently as 2001, was designed to cover up sexual abuse by priests:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the document is being taken out of context, that it's a church law that deals only with religious crimes and sins. And that the secrecy is meant to protect the faithful from scandal.

“The idea that this is some sort of blueprint to keep this secret is simply wrong,” said Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, a spokesman for the Conference.“This is a system of law which is complete in itself and is not telling the bishops in any way about how to handle these crimes when they are considered as civil crimes,” Maniscalco said.

It's true that the document doesn't tell the bishops how to handle such cases as civil crimes, because the document never contemplates that civil prosecution is even a possibility. But once the complainant has been bound on oath and under penalty of excommunication "to keep the secret," (see paragraphs 11 and 13 in the first section of the document, "Preliminaries," *) it's hard to see how a criminal case could ever be brought.

And yes, in case you were wondering, that's the same Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) that thinks that allowing children otherwise condemned to life in orphanages or foster homes to be adopted by gay couples would mean "actually doing violence to these children." (Paragraph 7 *.)

I think non-Catholics sometimes fail to appreciate the Vatican's wry sense of humor.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:47 AM | |

A story is told -- a canonical one, I believe -- of an insurance agent who served as the chair of the Insurance Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates. When a reporter dared to inquire about possible conflicts of interest, the legislator replied: "Whaddaya mean? It don't conflict with my interest at all."

Dwitght Meredith notes * that one could easily staff a blue-ribbon commission on relations with Saudi Arabia with members of law firms that are defending Saudi Arabia against the 9-11 victims' families. He's especially upset that Jamie Gorelick, who serves on the actual 9-11 Commission, is a partner in a firm that represents one of the Saudi defendants in the families' suit. Dwight asserts that, as a matter of legal ethics, Gorelick must resign.*

I agree, but I wouldn't advise Dwight to hold his breath.

My earlier post * does not seem to have convinced many of my lawyer friends. They are taught in law school that the ethics of an adversary legal system trumps the ethics of common sense, which holds that:

--doing a skilled job for someone constitutes helping that person;
--helping people do evil things is wrong; and
--helping the enemies of one's country is disloyal.

I refer them to the chapter called "Professional Detachment" in Arthur Applbaum's masterful Ethics for Adversaries *.

The decision to take a client shouldn't be, and isn't in fact, automatic. It's an exercise of judgment, for which lawyers ought to be held morally accountable. I'm virtually certain that none of the white-shoe firms defending the Saudis would have taken a case, civil or criminal, for one of the Mafia families. And I'm quite certain that the strong need, under the adversary system, for everyone to be represented in court does not keep those same firms from refusing clients who can't pay their bills.

Here's a hypothetical for the advoctates of adversary ethics to ponder: would you have represented a slaveholder in an action under the Fugitive Slave Act, given a good-faith belief that the person in question was, in fact, the lawful property of your potential client? If so, then I'll have to agree that you really believe in the adversary system.

If not, there must be some times when a lawyer shouldn't take a legally meritorious case. Perhaps defending the financiers of mass murder -- the operators of a system of finance that is still educating the mass murderers of tomorrow in Wahhabbist madrassas -- against a tort action by the relatives of the victims is different in some relevant way, but I'd like to hear someone explain precisely how, rather than just reciting mantras about how the adversary system magically leads to justice being done.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:38 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Matt Yglesias * demonstrates how unfit a philosophy degree makes you for the real word: why, he seems to think that it would be desirable to have an administration that examined the facts and deduced its policies, rather than vice versa.

He gives foreign policy * , economic policy, and the abuse of scientific studies in the decision-making process * as examples.

Man, talk about naive!

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:26 PM | |

At last! A funding vehicle other than the DNC for those of us who simply can't stand the thought of four more years with the current crew in power. Tom Edsall has the story. *

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:14 PM | |

I agree with Tapped*: Al Gore's Move On speech (*) was first-rate; if he'd spoken that clearly in 2000, he'd be President today. (Yes, there would have been disadvantages to electing as President someone who still doesn't get that the Kyoto Treaty was a bad joke, but you have to take the bitter with the sweet.)

If someone other than Bush is going to be inaugurated in 2005 it will be because other Democrats learn to make speeches like this. GWB should hear "honor and integrity" as relentlessly as his father heard "read my lips."

P.s. Too bad the speechwriter doesn't know "rein" from "reign."

Update Thanks to CalPundit *, this Daily Howler account * of the Right-wing Spin Machine in action: Fred Barnes is denying that the Bush crew ever tried to link Saddam Hussein to 9-11. No, really. Pandagon * is also on the case.

... how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?

-- Yeats *

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:47 PM | |

The Democrats who run the California legislature have stubbornly refused to cut services as much as needed to close the budget gap, while the Republican minority has been able to block the necessary tax increases. So the state just passed a "budget" that doesn't budge, and is going to have to be reopened in a few months.

Don't worry, though, the Terminator is on the job (*):

He was only slightly more specific about his agenda than he was a day earlier, when he entered the campaign, promising to have a "detailed" budget plan soon and insisting that there were choices other than program cuts or tax increases to balance the state's budget.

"We have to overhaul our economic agenda," he said. "We have to make sure everyone in California has a fantastic job." He added that "it is very important that our children have first access to our state treasury."

Of course, in the short run there's nothing the state can do that will make any noticeable impact on business location decisions, and it's in the short run that the state is going to run out of money. As to "making sure everyone in California has a fantastic job," what the $%# is that supposed to mean? If this is an example of what Schwarzenegger means by "leadership," (that's what he's promising, in lieu of actually knowing anything about state government) let's have some more of the old hacks instead.

Schwarzenegger is starting to make Gray Davis look good. The fact that Riordan, whom Schwartzenegger just blindsided by getting into the race after he'd signaled that he was out, has endorsed him anyway tells you just how desperate the non-lunatic wing of the California Republicans has become for anything that looks like a way to get back into power.

Here's an idea, though: Instead of raising taxes or cutting spending, let's just have the state go into the business of selling whatever Aaaaaahnold has been smoking. It must be preemo weed if it's convinced such an allegedly smart guy that we can fix an 11-figure budget problem with nothing but wishful thinking.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:32 PM | |

Phil Carter relays a troubling story about the role of forced labor in staffing the Korean brothels that serve US soldiers there, and adds some of his own reflections from his days in Korea as an MP lieutenant*.

According to Phil, soldiers are forbidden to patronize prostitutes, and the MPs make somewhat futile attempts to enforce that rule, while the Korean authorities don't seem to do much to enforce their laws against prostitution or forced labor.

Arguably pimping, and buying prostitutes' services, ought to be against the law. (I have a harder time seeing the justification for laws punishing the workers, as opposed to the customers and the managers.) If Korea has domestic laws against prostitution, surely we have some responsibility as guests to prevent our soldiers from patronizing establishments that violate that law. But there are arguments on both sides of criminalizing the sex trade, and if the local authorities aren't complaining loudly I wouldn't make enforcing the ban on servicemembers' visits to brothels a high priority for the MPs.

However, when it comes to forced prostitution, the issues are at once simpler and more urgent. Slavery is a crime against humanity. Slavery in the sex trade is, if possible, even worse than other kinds of slavery. To my mind, someone who pays for and uses the sexual services of a slave is morally -- and, if I got to write the laws, would be legally -- a rapist, since he has engaged in sexual relations with an unconsenting party. And in a country where sexual slavery is known to be an issue, I'd make that a crime of strict liability, as carnal knowledge of a minor is: the customer should be responsible for assuring himself that the person he's about to have sex with has consented to it.

As to the people who sell the sexual services of slaves, that is one of the instances where my analytic support for capital punishment is backed by my emotions: I, for one, would be happy to spring the gallows trap-door under the operator of a forced-labor brothel, preferably at the front door of the establishment.

Given that view of the matter, enforcement of the ban using prostitutes' services by US servicepeople ought to be a high priority with respect to establishments that use forced labor. But that moral simplicity and urgency runs into economic complexity, on two levels.

First, the distinction between free and forced labor may not be as clear in practice as we would like it to be. In what sense is a fifteen-year-old rural girl whose family takes money from a big-city brothel operator in return for sending her to work there, and who will wind up disowned and homeless if she refuses, "free"? At minimum, though, any institution that physically prevents its workers from leaving is engaging in slavery.

Second, suppressing forced-labor prostitution may conflict operationally with suppressing free-labor prostitution. Since free-labor brothels and forced-labor brothels compete, the strongest stance the US military could take against sex slavery would be to place specifically forced-labor establishments, but not others, off limits to servicemembers. (That assumes we can tell the difference, which isn't obviously true.) Enforcing the ban on visiting prostitutes even-handedly on both sorts of establishments reduces demand overall but does nothing to change the competitive balance between them. If the goal is to minimize the number of our soldiers who commit rape-by-money, it would probably be better to leave the ordinary bothels alone and ban only those that employ slaves.

The harder problem has to do with tourists, as opposed to soldiers. Americans (like Europeans and Japanese) patronize forced-labor brothels from Port-au-Prince to Bangkok. My instinct is that doing so by U.S. residents should be made a violation of U.S. domestic law. But I don't know how to either write such a law or enforce it.

One thing I'm sure of, though: if I wrote the Freedom House report, I'd give much greater weight than now seems to be the case to enforcement of the ban on forced labor, especially forced sexual labor, in the calculation of how "free" each country is. FH gives Thailand, for example, a "civil liberty" rating of 3 (where 1 is best, 7 worst) despite this summary of the sex trade there (*):

Tens of thousands of Thai women and children work as prostitutes, many of them after being trafficked to cities from their villages. Authorities prosecute relatively few traffickers, and many police, soldiers, and local officials are involved in trafficking, the U.S. State Department report said. Some women are forced into prostitution, and in addition, many prostitutes work as bonded laborers in order to pay off loans made to their parents by brothel owners. Thailand has at least 200,000 prostitutes, according to NGO and government estimates.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 12:53 PM | |

Douglas Jehl finally breaks the Valerie Plame story (he seems to have concluded that she is, professionally, Ms. Plame) in the news columns of the New York Times (*). There seems to be no new fact, but most of the major issues are raised, though in terms of an accusation by Wilson rather than in terms of fairly obvious evidence of serious crime by high officials.

Jehl's story is cautiously reported -- he merely quotes unnamed administration sources as denying everything, rather than either putting senior figures on record or noting their refusal to speak on the record, and the fact that the apparent actions of two senior administration officials would constitute an aggravated felony is toned down to the assertion that "officials are barred by law" from doing what they seem to have done -- but it's there.

I'm trying to figure out what could generate the next round of news stories on this, and coming up rather dry.

Update Here's (*) an even more cautious story from the Washington Times, which doesn't even mention the law about burning CIA undercover officers, but does have a gratuitious slam at Wilson from ex-convict Caspar Weinberger. Note the technique of framing the issue in terms of Wilson making an accusation, rather than concentrating on the ample independent evidence of high-level criminality.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:43 AM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Dahlia Lithwick complains (*) about the practice of issuing "John Doe" indictments in cases where police have a complaint of rape and a DNA sample but no identified defendant, in order to stop the clock on the statute of limitations.

I share her concern about the difficulty in defending old cases, and agree with her that stopping the clock is no substitute for adding the resources needed to get the job of matching samples done in a timely fashion.

But in this case, I can't agree with Lithwick that there's a substantial risk that actual injustice will be done. A semen sample in a rape kit is proof of intercourse. So the only remaining question is consent. How many women actually have consensual sex with men whose names they don't know and whom they have no other way of identifying?

Yes, I can imagine the circumstances in which it could happen -- a frat party, or a bar pickup followed by a drunken one-night stand -- but most of these cases aren't going to be "date rapes": they're going to be run-of-the-mill, jumping-out-from-behind-the-bushes rape rapes.

If the lawyers have figured out a way to keep the statute of limitations from protecting the perpetrators, I say "Good for them!" I suppose I'll just have to get my civil libertarian ticket punched next time.

Update The case for doing a "John Doe" indictment is especially strong in serial-rape cases, where the semen taken from several complainants matches. * In those cases, the probability of innocence approaches zero.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:00 PM | |

I'd always assumed that the "Nazi" cracks about Schwartzenegger had to do with his accent and his family history, which shouldn't be held against anyone. Wrong!

Most of the voters in California won't follow the details about how Aaaaanold played footsie with Kurt Waldheim (apparently part of his motivation was to stay politically viable in Austria in case he wanted to run for President there rather than Governor here). Still, a poster showing him dressed as an SS officer (not hard to PhotoShop) with the legend "We'll be back" should communicate the message well enough.

I'm not at all unhappy about this, because I was very unhappy when Garamendi joined Bustamente in the race and Issa dropped out, thus apparently handing it to the Terminator on a platter.

It's true that Schwarzenegger is a "moderate" among Republicans: i.e., not a lunatic like Simon. But "moderates" can have lousy public morals and bad ideas, too.

Schwarzenegger's one serious foray into politics to date was his promotion of Proposition 49, which set aside a big chunk of revenue -- money that even then it was clear the state didn't have to spare -- for a set of unproven "after-school" programs with a Rube Goldberg administrative setup to run them.

I find it easy to believe that there are things to do with kids after school that would have benefits in excess of their costs. Whether they will actually get done under Prop. 49 is a different question, though they might. It's even (barely) conceivable that the program will have the 9-to-1 benefit-to-cost ratio Schwartzenegger had some tame think tank estimate for him.

But that's not the same as saying that the program will "save taxpayers money," as the official website for the proposition (*) claimed it would. The money spent on that program will either have to come out of other programs or it will have to come out of new taxes, and the proponents carefully designed the proposition without a funding mechanism other than a share in the growth of the state's revenue base, thus winning the support of all the usual right-wing anti-tax groups. (Of course, growing revenue doesn't mean slack in the budget, given rising prices and population growth, but that point was carefully concealed from the voters.)

And of course Aaaanold and his friends refused to say what they proposed to cut to pay for their new goodie: they pretended they wouldn't have to cut anything, as if tax revenue rained down from heaven.

It was fairly obvious from the word "go" that the proposition was mostly about self-promotion. The website, for example, is joinarnold.com.

I saw Schwarzenegger on TV election night. When the reporter paused in her swooning over him to ask a fairly pointed question about why the people should vote for the proposition in the face of complete uncertainty about whether it would work and whether the state could afford it fiscally, he gave her a nasty look and said, "We've had enough reports. It's time to stop studying the problem and do something."

The thought of putting this cynical, arrogant clown in charge of closing the state's budget gap would make me laugh, if I didn't have to live here.

So I hope the press and his opponents play mean, with the Nazi stuff and the rough-play-on-the-casting-couch stuff, and I hope enough of it sticks to keep him out of the Governorship.

Update Kevin Moore disagrees (*):

Arnold is not a Nazi. He's a moderate Republican with marital ties to the Kennedy clan. So no Nazi threat. His failure to disavow Waldheim is very much in tune with Austrian sentiment, a mixture of shame and defensiveness thicker than Arnold's accent. His own dad was a Nazi, which Arnold has already publicly cited as a source of shame.

All of that is true, but I think it misses what I see as the issue here: the character -- the political, as opposed to the private, character -- of the man who wants to start his political career as Governor of California.

I can have compassion for Schwarzenegger's family situation, but I don't see any reason to extend that compassion to his calculated decision to support a candidate for President of Austria who was demonstrably a war criminal, with personal responsibility for a major massacre. For Aaaaaahnold to say that he's ashamed of his father's Nazi past, while, in his own present, helping a Nazi war criminal retain high office, seems to me even more shamelessly hypocritical than the norm for office-seekers.

No, I don't think that Schwarzenegger would pursue Nazi-like policies as governor. That's not the point. Given a moral choice to make on a major matter, he chose personal ties and personal ambition over principle. That's a legitimate issue, not a mudball.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:40 PM | |

Newsweek reports (*) that Baker, Botts -- James Baker's law firm -- is defending Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, against a lawsuit filed by families of the 9-11 victims. (Thanks to Tapped for the pointer.) Baker was last seen, you will recall, making sure that the votes didn't get counted in Florida. One of Baker's former partners, who was George W. Bush's personal lawyer, is now Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

It seems the defense is going to be that whatever aid Prince Sultan gave to the terrorists was part of his official duties.

Apparently the Administration has decided that it can't take the political heat that would come from having the Justice Department intervene on the Saudi side of this dispute, and some national-security officials are sufficiently fed up with Saudi stonewalling to be helping the plaintiffs. We can hope for a series of interesting revelations coming out of the lawsuit; the Baker, Botts filing already has lots of detail about how the Saudi government funneled money to various Islamic "charities."

The Newsweek story doesn't raise the question that pops into my mind: Do the plaintiffs have standing to ask to see the 28 pages of censored material from the 9-11 report?

On the one hand, this suit may change some people's view of the plaintiffs' tort bar. If you think about capping Saudi liability for 9-11 to direct financial losses plus $250,000 a victim, "tort reform" suddenly doesn't sound so enticing. On the other hand, in case you wanted to know why people make lawyer jokes, just read the list of top law firms that have decided to back the perpetrators against the victims: Wilmer, Cutler; Jones, Day; Ropes & Grey; White & Case; King & Spalding; Akin Gump ; and Fulbright & Jaworski. And I haven't heard of a single lawyer resigning from one of those firms in protest. Just backs up my long-held belief that almost all the major law firms are actually subsidiaries of a single institution, the Platonic Form of a law firm: Pig, Pig & Pig.

I was glad to see that one Clinton Administration alumnus at a major firm -- both unnamed in the story -- decided that $5 million wasn't enough money to make him take the case.

Update Conrad, the Gweilo Diarist, challenges me (*) on two points, one factual and one ethical. Ethically, he wonders whether I think unpopular defendants should be denied legal representation. Factually, he wants to know why I'm sure the 9-11 report demonstrates the Saudis' guilt, since obviously I haven't read it.

Second things first: I base my evaluation of what's in the report on what Senator Bob Graham, one of its authors, has said, and on a report in the New Republic based on a conversation with someone who has read it (*). [If you don't want to bother with NR's sign-in, here's my summary.] (See also this report by Conrad on a speech by Ashcroft, which doesn't speak to what's in the report but does speak to the truth of the accusation in the victims' lawsuit.)

As to the ethical question, everybody's entitled to a lawyer. But no particular lawyer is required to take on the ethical burden of "zealous advocacy" for any particular client in any particular case.

If, as I believe, the Saudi government knowingly contributed to and otherwise supported al-Qaeda, with the knowledge that al-Qaeda had attacked, and was planning to continue to attack, the United States, that support constituted an act of war. Countries who make war on us are our enemies. Citizens who voluntarily work for the enemies of our country -- especially rich, influential citizens -- can, I think, justly be criticized for disloyalty, even if they undertake those acts of disloyalty in the course of the practice of law.

If respectable, skilled, connected lawyers such as those at the firms I named refused to take this case, the Saudi defendants would wind up being defended by less respectable, less skilled, less connected lawyers, to their detriment and our benefit. Remember, "zealous advocacy" doesn't mean just in the courtroom: part of what Prince Sultan is buying here is Baker's influence in Washington.

[I concede that the ethical issues would be somewhat different in a criminal case. But the defendants in this case have nothing to lose but their honor and some of their excessive supplies of money.]

Really, Conrad: how hard is it to figure out that the former Secretary of State of the United States shouldn't be carrying water for the foreign power responsible for the largest massacre of Americans ever carried out?

More here *

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:21 AM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Josh Marshall has an ugly story (*): the Iraqi scientist who gave up the old centrifuge parts isn't being allowed to come to the US, as he was promised, because he insists on giving answers the Administration doesn't want to hear about the Iraqi WMD program.

It's bad for the Iraqi that he's being welsched on. It's bad for the U.S. that we're welsching on him, because it will tend to dry up sources of information (and create sources of disinformation).

But most of all, it's bad for the U.S. to have its intelligence services dedicated to providing verification for the party line rather than discovering facts about the dangerous world we live in. And it's worse to have an Administration so contemptuous of any realities but political realities.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:14 PM | |

Before getting down to serious business regarding my Slate essay (*), three corrections on factual points:

1. The original version described the program as "fundamentalist." It turns out that the Prison Fellowship is on the "evangelical" side of the fundamentalist/evangelical divide, a distinction I was aware of but don't quite fully understand. Many of those who call themselves "evangelicals" regard "fundamentalist" as a term of abuse. I should have been more careful, and I apologize to anyone who was offended. The error has been corrected on Slate.

2. The document I quoted about faith appears in the King James Version as "The Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews." But apparently modern scholars, and more contemporary Bible translations, reject that traditional attribution. I'm happy to be corrected on that point.

3. The difference between the experimentals and the controls isn't statistically signficant, so saying that the experimentals did "somewhat worse" can't really be supported. All one can say with confidence is that the Penn study does not provide support for the claim made by PF and the White House that IFI reduced crime among its participants.

Most of the correspondence from my Slate essay that wasn't merely vituperative concerned the issue of selection bias. The objections came in two forms, equivalent statistically but not emotionally.

Several of my pen-pals used the parable of the starfish: On a beach where several thousand starfish lie stranded after a storm, a little boy is picking them up, one by one, and throwing them back into the water. A grown-up says to him, "What you're doing is very nice, but it can't possibly make a difference to all these starfish." The boy nods, picks up another starfish, throws it into the ocean, and says, "Made a difference to that one." If IFI helped some prisoners, why criticize it for not helping other prisoners?

The other form of the same objection is that, since no treatment works on those who don't get it, it's logical to measure results on completers only rather than all attempters. (One of those making this objection was, rather frighteningly, an MD engaged in cardiology research.) Actually, the medical analogy, which several of my correspondents invoked, is a good one, and perhaps a numerical example will help:

Imagine a disease, and a proposed treatment for that disease. We want to know whether the treatment works. What experiment should we do, and how should we interpret the results?

Take 2000 people with the disease. Randomly select 1000 of them as "experimentals," leaving the other 1000 as "controls." The experimentals get offered the treatment; the controls we just observe.

Now say that, of the 1000 controls, 100 get better. That's a recovery rate of 10%. That's the target the treatment has to beat to convince us that it works.

Assume that half of the experimentals accept the treatment and follow through to the end. So we have 500 "completers" (or "graduates," in the IFI context). The other 500 are "drop-outs."

Now imagine that 75 of the 500 completers recover. That's a recovery rate of 15%. The treatment worked!

Wait. Not so fast. We need to look at the dropouts. If 50 of them recovered, the same rate as the control group, then we can say the treatment effect was real: 125 of the experimentals, but only 100 of the controls, got better. But what if only 25 of the drop-outs recovered? Then what would we say?

If we look at the whole group of 1000 people who were offered treatment, 100, or 10% of them, recovered, the same as in the control group. So being offered the treatment didn't do anything to improve the recovery rate. Something's wrong here. We'd have to say that something caused the people in the experimental group who were more likely to recover to also stick with the treatment. (Perhaps people who start to feel better have more energy to continue.)

It's not that we're blaming the treatment for the bad outcomes of the dropouts: it's just that we're noticing that its seemingly higher cure rate came from cherry-picking its participants rather than actually curing them.

The only other possibility, assuming that the original randomization succeeded in producing similar groups, is that the treatment helped some people and actually hurt others. That's possible in the medical context. I suppose it's conceivable that IFI actually made some of its participants worse, but it's not obvious how that would happen. Selection effects are a much more likely explanation for the actual pattern of results. Anyway, how happy would we be with a program that hurt more people than it helped?

[One sophisticated correspondent suggested that the volunteers for IFI might have included a higher proportion of manipulative inmates, and that therefore the two groups weren't really matched. That could be true, though at first guess you'd think that people who volunteered would be disporportionately those who really wanted to turn their lives around. But at best that "negative selection effect" theory means that we're not sure the program failed; as mere speculation, it can't justify a claim that the program succeeded. The same applies to claims that it might lead to better outcomes after the study period, or to gains other than reductions in crime. They're all conceivable, but there's no evidence for them, and the claim made was that the program was a proven method of crime control.]

If IFI had succeeded according to "just-one-starfish" rules -- helping some while not hurting others -- it could reasonably claim success. But it didn't, acccording to the numbers its advocates put out.

Several people asked, rather huffily, if UCLA uses all its matriculants, rather than only its graduates, when it advertises the success rates of its students. Good question. I probably don't want to know the answer.

Many of the extreme claims made for the job-market benefits of higher education, and especially of elite higher education, are merely applications of selection bias. (One of my colleagues at Harvard used to claim that the institution's operating principle was to select the best, get out of the way while they educated one another, and then claim credit for their accomplishments.) Scholars who have worked hard to overcome the selection-bias problem report that, even correcting for that, higher education still has a respectable rate of return in financial terms.

I'm still skeptical, because some of those increased earnings for graduates presumably come at the expense of the people they beat out for jobs; the social rate of return must therefore be less than the private rate, and it's conceivable that the marginal social rate of return to higher education, in purely financial terms, is negative. Whether the non-financial benefits of higher education are large enough to compensate would be a different, and even harder, question.

But, yes, an honest study of the effects of higher education would have to look at drop-outs as well as graduates.

I was also accused of "hypocrisy" for liking literacy programs despite the absence of true random-assignment studies. There are good logical reasons to think that boosting reading scores improves job-market opportunity, and job-market success reduces recidivism. There is no doubt that adults with low reading scores can be taught to read better at relatively low expense. So I have fairly good confidence that prison literacy programs work, and are cost-effective compared to other means of crime control.

But note that my conclusion was not that we should launch a massive program of prison education, but that we ought to run the experiment. If it came out negative, on a true random design including the dropouts, I'd be disappointed and a litte surprised, but I'd have to say either "I give up" or "Back to the drawing-board." I wouldn't tell fairy-tales about how it really worked, if you only look at the people it worked for.

Some of my readers wanted to take this as a matter of perspective, or of opinion. Sorry. It's not. It's a matter of black-letter statistical method, something that could be on the exam in any first-year methods course. Each of us gets to choose a viewpoint, but we all have to work from the same facts.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 02:23 PM | |
Thread: Crime Control

I wouldn't want anyone to face the email in-box I faced last night and this morning as a result of my Slate essay (*) on the Prison Fellowship, but reading through it was an educational experience. I couldn't resist sharing one of the more ... interesting ... letters. About half of the couple of hundred messages were one variation or another on the message of Christian love and compassion below. (See the post above for more substantive issues.)

One striking pattern in the email was the willingness of many correspondents to assume that they knew my personal religious position: only an atheist, it seemed to them, could doubt a faith-based program. I doubt they would have made the same inference had I been criticizing an Islamic prison ministry.

This is not the time or place for a theological discussion -- I'm much less a "bright" than I used to be, as this document reflects -- but it's worth making a distinction between my own beliefs on religious questions and my beliefs about the effects of spiritual growth, and of religiosity, on behavior.

It's quite possible to be an atheist and still think that religious belief and practice has, on average, good behavioral consequences. That, I take, it, was more or less Franklin's view, and it was the view Gibbon said prevailed in elite circles in early Imperial Rome: "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrates, as equally useful."

As I pointed out in the original piece, a finding that IFI reduced recidivism would have been perfectly consistent with a disbelief in its theological underpinnings. The faith of the program operators, and the faith they manage to instill in the program participants, can have real-world effects, without regard to the truth or falsity of the beliefs involved. Christians and Zen Buddhists believe seemingly inconsistent things (I say "seemingly" because so much religious language is metaphor that strong rules of noncontradiction can't be applied). Yet I would have no trouble believing that both Christian and Zen missionaries could run programs that improved people's lives. The same goes for the claims made for various meditation programs; they're plausible on their face, and I'll believe them when I see the data from a competently designed experiment carried out by a truly independent group of scholars.

I don't like Colson's theology, his politics, or what I know of his ethics, so I'm not dismayed to learn that his program didn't work, but it might have worked, or some other program he tried might work, and I'd have no trouble believing that if the studies were done right. Just call me Doubting Thomas.

Here's the reader's letter:

Klieman,

How dare you insult programs that try and help the angry, outraged, and bitter criminal's in our society! You have nothing good to say, EVER! You are racest! Stop attacking programs that might help even one person to achieve a higher standard and quality of life. Intead, you bastardize the our president and have nothing better to do than spew statisicle bullcrap and add no value in your comments! Your pathetic! Go join in some anger managment group therapy! It's obvious you have anger issues and hate Christian's.

Thanks for waisting my time
Daniel

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:37 AM | |

Jane Galt objects to the release of the 28 censored pages about Saudi involvement in the 9-11 massacres on the grounds that, once we acknowledge publicly that the Saudi Royal Family was directly responsible for the murder of 3000 Americans, we will have no alternative but to go to war, conquer the Kingdom, and then face the rage of the "Arab street" at the spectacle of infidel boots marching through Mecca and Medina.

I don't agree with her analysis, but she deserves credit for putting the real issue on the table; the Administration's "protecting sources and methods" story just won't wash.

I think we can face the facts without going to war. No doubt, Saudi participation in that attack, if verified, would constitute a casus belli; but the existence of a casus belli does not obligate the injured state to go to war. The Iranian hostage-taking of 1979,, for example, was a casus belli.

Perhaps Jane means only that releasing the information would make war politically inevitable in terms of domestic U.S. politics. I doubt it. It would make it politically necessary for the Bush Administration to do change its stance toward the Saudi monarchy and its support for the worldwide Wahhabbi movement, but "doing something" could and would stop far short of invasion.

After all, who but the neocons and radio talk show hosts and warbloggers would actually support invading Saudi Arabia? Not the Bush team, not the corporate sector, not the Democrats, not the mass media, and not the majority of the people, in the absence of the kind of all-out propaganda drive that led up to the invasion of Iraq.

Now an argument could be made -- and it's one I'm not professionally competent to judge -- that the US national interest is best served by appeasing the Saudis rather than confronting them. That argument would be politically very unpopular if the report were released; that is why the Bush team is so intent on not releasing it.

But if this President is so incapable of leadership that his only means of restraining popular fury is to keep the public in the dark about who attacked us on 9-11, that's the best argument I've heard yet for getting ourselves a new President.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:31 PM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

Thanks to a pointer from the MinuteMan, here's the transcript of the segment of the Wolf Blitzer program featuring Ambassador Joseph Wilson. There's not much new here -- Wilson seems to be back in equivocation mode about his wife's job status -- but the tone of Wilson's remarks don't lend much support to the attempts on the right to paint him as some sort of wild-eyed Baath sympathizer. The silence on this story from the mainstream print media grows more and more deafening.

CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER (*)

Aired August 3, 2003 - 12:00 ET

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BLITZER: President Bush speaking those now famous or infamous 16 words about Iraq's alleged nuclear program in his State of the Union Address in January.

Welcome back to "LATE EDITION."

We're joined now by the man who went to Africa to personally investigate whether Iraq attempted to purchase uranium, the former U.S. acting ambassador to Iraq, Joseph Wilson.

Mr. Ambassador, welcome back to "LATE EDITION."

I want to get to that whole issue in just a moment, but listen to what David Kay, who is now working for the CIA, the former U.N. weapons inspector, says about the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. DAVID KAY, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: There is solid evidence being produced. We do not intend to expose this evidence until we have full confidence that it is solid proof of what we're proposed to take -- to talk about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: I think he's being very cautious now, given some of the missteps in the past. But do you have confidence in David Kay, that they know what they're doing?

JOSEPH WILSON, FORMER U.S. ACTING AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ: Oh, absolutely, and I've had confidence in -- that we would find weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction programs from the very beginning of the run-up to the war in Iraq.

687, the initial U.N. resolution dealing with weapons of mass destruction, demanded compliance, and it had as its objective disarmament. We had not yet achieved disarmament, so it was perfectly appropriate to continue to try and gather together the international consensus to disarm Saddam and his programs.

I think we'll find chemical weapons. I think we'll find biological precursors that may or may not have been weaponized. And I think we will find a continuing interest of -- on nuclear weapons. The question really is whether it met the threshold test of imminent threat to our own national security or even the test of grave and gathering danger.

BLITZER: And you believe, going into the war, that that threshold had not been met?

WILSON: No, not at all. I believe that we had to be aggressive in disarming and that the posture we had to take had to include the credible threat of force. And in order for that threat of force to be credible, we had to be prepared to use it.

What I disagreed with was the other agendas that were in play that led us to invade, conquer and now occupy Iraq.

BLITZER: But did they exaggerate the threat?

WILSON: Well, in my particular piece of this, the Niger piece, I think it's very clear that this rumor kept popping back up...

BLITZER: That they were seeking uranium -- enriched uranium from Africa.

WILSON: Right...

BLITZER: Which they have sought in the past. Which they have sought in the past.

WILSON: Which they had sought in the '80s, and all that was well documented. And there was, in fact, a delegation that went from Baghdad to Niamey in 1999. That visit was well documented in U.S. reporting as well.

BLITZER: I know you were sent to go on this mission long before the State of the Union Address. When Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, was on this program a few weeks ago, on July 13th, I asked her about your mission. Listen to this exchange I had with her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I didn't know Joe Wilson was going to Niger. And if you look in Director Tenet's statement, it says that counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, sent Joe Wilson. So, I don't know...

BLITZER: Who sent him?

RICE: Well, it was certainly not at a level that had anything to do with the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Is that true?

WILSON: Well, look, it's absolutely true that neither the vice president nor Dr. Rice nor even George Tenet knew that I was traveling to Niger.

What they did, what the office of the vice president did, and, in fact, I believe now from Mr. Libby's statement, it was probably the vice president himself...

BLITZER: Scooter Libby is the chief of staff for the vice president.

WILSON: Scooter Libby.

They asked essentially that we follow up on this report -- that the agency follow up on the report. So it was a question that went to the CIA briefer from the Office of the Vice President. The CIA, at the operational level, made a determination that the best way to answer this serious question was to send somebody out there who knew something about both the uranium business and those Niger officials that were in office at the time these reported documents were executed.

BLITZER: I want you to elaborate on what you said, I believe, in Time magazine, that this was a smear job against you, this entire post-mortem that's been coming up since then, including your wife, who works at the CIA exposing her, for example. What did you mean by that?

WILSON: Well, first of all, with respect to my wife, I don't answer any questions. And anything that I say with respect to that, the allegations about her are all hypothetical. I would not confirm or deny her place of employment. To do so would be, if she were, a breach of national security; and if she were not, at a minimum, what they have done is they have forced her to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions from neighbors and friends and whatnot.

But what I said to Time magazine and to others is that these attacks on me, which were really very minor -- Cliff May saying that I told the truth because I was a Democrat. I went out to Iraq because I was an American patriot and my government asked me to go out.

But the idea seemed to me, in going after me and then later making these allegations about my wife, was clearly designed to keep others from stepping forward.

If you recall, there were any number of analysts who were quoted anonymously as saying that the vice president had seemed to pressure them in his many trips out to the CIA. I don't know if that's true or not, but you can be sure that a GS-14 or 15 with a couple of kids in college, when he sees the allegations that came from senior administration officials about my family are in the public domain, you can be sure that he's going to be worried about what might happen if he were to step forward.

BLITZER: And you still want an investigation to find out if laws were broken in releasing this information, for example, about your wife?

WILSON: Well, yes, and hypothetically speaking, about my wife. If in fact she is as Mr. Novak alleged in his...

BLITZER: Bob Novak.

WILSON: ... Bob Novak, the journalist, alleged in his article, then the two senior administration officials, who leaked that information are libel or vulnerable to investigation under a 1982 law dealing with the identification of American agents.

BLITZER: How close in your estimate -- and you're an expert on this -- is the U.S. to finding Saddam Hussein? WILSON: It's a hit and miss thing. If Saddam is actually out in Mosul with the western tribes, as was asserted this morning, then he might be more exposed. If he's in a neighborhood in Baghdad, I think it's a little bit more difficult to find him, because the neighborhoods he's going to frequent are full of fervent Baathist supporters, and it's hard for U.S. troops to get in there unnoticed; it's hard to spring a surprise.

BLITZER: If they found Saddam Hussein, captured him or killed him, would be it over then? Would everything, sort of, fall into place and Ambassador Bremer could have, sort of, easy ride to get democracy, elections, a new Iraqi regime in place?

WILSON: Well, I actually think having found Qusay and Uday was better in driving the wooden stake through the heart of the idea that there would be a Hussein dynasty that would reemerge.

I think as the two senators said earlier, that Saddam is largely a spent force. Killing him will kill the tyrant, and that will be a good thing.

That said, I think that what we face here is we face the fact that we defeated the Sunni tribe, and the Sunni tribe would like to come back and reassert itself in power or at a minimum will want to defend itself against both U.S. occupation forces and what they fear is going to be a Shia attempt to assert their power over the country.

So I don't think over the medium and long term this is over by a long shot.

BLITZER: We want to have you back and talk about Liberia. You're an expert on Africa too. But we don't have time, unfortunately for that today.

Ambassador Joe Wilson, thanks for joining us.

WILSON: Good to be with you, Wolf. Thanks.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:24 PM | |

Neighborhoods are what make cities great, right?
And we all know that black churches are the pillars of the African-American community.

Maybe not.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 03:16 PM | |

The White House hyped the "success" of one of Chuck Colson's programs, apparently without bothering to read the study (*) showing it didn't work. [This essay in Slate (*) has some details I missed in my earlier post (*) on the topic.]

It looks as if the President isn't the only person in the White House who "isn't a fact-checker." As long as the story fits the party line, why worry about whether it's true or not?

Paul Krugman (you know, the one all the conservatives used to admire before he got so shrill and partisan) gives examples from the Treasury Department's Tax Policy Office*; Fred Kaplan (*) explains how facts weren't allowed to get in the way of planning for post-war Iraq.

There's a great essay to be written about the second Bush Administration as our first truly post-modern Presidency.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:53 PM | |

Apparently Tony Blair and his friends can't decide what to do about the David Kelly case. Up to now, their line has been that the BBC fabricated its report that Kelly had said that the Blairites with ordered that intelligence about Iraqi WMDS be "sexed up." (*) But their new story seems to be that Kelly, a scientist for the Ministry of Defence who committed suicide after being cross-examined by a House of Commons committee investigating the allegations, was in the grip of "Walter Mitty" fantasies.(*)

Putting aside the ethics of making rude remarks about a dead man before he's even been buried, I don't think the PM and his supporters can have it both ways.

I rather admire Blair, and wish he were here running as the Democratic candidate for President, but this looks bad. Perhaps the British inquiries will eventually shed some light on what UK intelligence had or had not "learned" about the Iraqi WMD program.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:53 AM | |

Eugene Volokh explains (*) why you should (in most cases) vote the party, not the candidate. Now he just needs to work on his choice of party.

[Eugene does miss one good reason for ticket-splitting: the more ticket-splitters there are, the stronger the incentive for the parties to come up with decent candidates, as illustrated by the Lautenberg-for-Torricelli switch last year. But his overall point is right: if you have a strong party preference, that should determine most of your votes.]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 09:03 AM | |

Forty-six senators have signed a letter to the President (*) asking for release of the famous 28 pages of the 9-11 report

Many of the signatures are illegible, but the ones I can read are all those of Democrats (including Kerry, Edwards, and Graham), except for Sam Brownback, who co-sponsored the letter with Chuck Schumer.

Meanwhile, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman report in TRO Online (*) that:

...an official who has read the report tells The New Republic that the support described in the report goes well beyond [Saudi contributions to charities with links to al-Qaeda]: It involves connections between the hijacking plot and the very top levels of the Saudi royal family. "There's a lot more in the 28 pages than money. Everyone's chasing the charities," says this official. "They should be chasing direct links to high levels of the Saudi government. We're not talking about rogue elements. We're talking about a coordinated network that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi government."

[snip]

For his part, Bush has insisted that revealing the 28 pages would compromise "sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the war on terror." But the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time of the joint inquiry, Florida Democrat Bob Graham and Alabama Republican Richard Shelby, rejected that argument, contending that perhaps only 5 percent of the 28 pages would compromise national security if made public. Graham and Shelby are leading a drive in Congress to force the government to declassify the documents.

[snip]

The official who read the 28 pages tells The New Republic, "If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has linking a foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape." He adds: "If the 28 pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight."

There's been a virtual news blackout on the letter, which may explain why Glenn Reynolds still thinks (*) that the Democrats aren't pushing the issue. (Why he imagines that the Bush Administration is eventually going to do the right thing about its friends in Riyadh is a different question.) The good news is that Senate procedures give the proponents of declassification many ways of forcing a vote on the question.

If the country can be made to understand that the Bush Administration is soft on the sponsors of terrorism, and if the Democrat who runs against him can credibly promise to be tougher, Bush could be in real trouble.

Update Kevin Drum (*) relays some thoughts from Greg Palast on why GWB might have a soft spot in his heart for the Kingdom.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 08:41 AM | |
Thread: The Saudi war on America

The following is the complete text of an item from Instapundit. (*)

TONY ADRAGNA WRITES on a U.S. "war crime" that wasn't.
There have been a lot of those, haven't there? But somehow I had missed this one.

That item turns out to refer to the matter of snatching the wife and daughter of an Iraqi general and leaving a note telling him to turn himself in if he wanted them released, an event commented on in this space (*) a few days ago.

The Adragna piece (*) is long and convoluted, with a number of references to various bits of international law. He makes out a reasonable case -- which he admits is not a conclusive case -- that the actions in question might be legal under the law of war.

If the wife and daughter were seized as potential sources of information, rather than merely to put pressure on the general,
and if the threat to hold them until he gave himself up was mere bluff, as the American colonel in charge says,
and if the ban on threats of hostage-taking in Protocol I means only threats that the threatening party means to carry out, rather than mere verbal threats,
or if we aren't bound by that provision because we haven't ratified Protocol I
and if the language in conventions we have ratified that seems to ban threats doesn't apply to threats of this type,
then -- Hurrah for our side! -- what the colonel did was legal.

Adragna's conclusion:

So far I'm not convinced that there was a violation of either international or U.S. law; not in spirit nor letter. The only thing I'm convinced of is that lots of people are wanting to make a big deal out of an incident that doesn't deserve the attention.

So where Adragna is merely not convinced that there was a violation, Instapundit, speaking in Andraga's name, somehow knows that this was "a US 'war crime' that wasn't." (Adragna gives no reason for his judgment that the accusation that the US military is engaging in hostage-taking doesn't deserve attention.)

Adragna refers to an analysis by Tacitus (*), taking a similarly judicious stance:

The laws of war, of course, forbid the taking of hostages. But do they forbid detaining civilians in areas under military rule? They don't, and herein lies a gray area that's getting ignored in the general indignation. [snip] If the family would have been released unharmed in due course regardless of the general's actions, then they were never hostages. That the general believed them hostages is a different matter entirely; but this in itself is not a moral (or legal) wrong. Interrogation, for example, often involves the threat of acts -- murder or torture, for example -- that the subject believes credible. But if these acts are not actually undertaken, then no moral or legal opprobrium attaches to the belief in their imminence.

Obviously the exculpation here rests in an unknowable -- only Col. David Hogg truly knows the fate of this family if the general had not caved. But if we take him at his word, then there is something less to this than the outraged parties allege.

Now you needn't agree with Tacitus's bland assertion that it is not immoral to threaten that which it would be flagrantly immoral to do. That's certainly not the rule in domestic law: an extortionate threat is a criminal act, even without any evidence that the threatener would have carried it out. But Tacitus's case is at least an arguable one.

However, Tacitus, being an intellectually honest sort, quickly retracts in the face of expert opinion:

UPDATE: SSG Terry Karney has this to say in comments:

Speaking as a professional (SSG, US Army, interrogation) I can say that what was done was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Note that COL Hogg did nothing to imply, to the person he was manipulating; by the seizing of his family, that they would be released soon.

Tacitus then adds:

The gist being (as articulated by cmdicely, among others) that it doesn't matter what the actual status of the detained family was -- the standard here rests wholly upon the belief of the targeted individual (in this case, the Iraqi general). This doesn't strike me as a particularly airtight standard, but in lieu of a better one, I'll defer to professional judgment here.

Phil Carter, who also qualifies as an expert on the law of war, agrees that the actions in question were probably illegal:

The U.S. did sign the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, and it explicitly precludes hostage taking in armed conflict:

There is also a norm of international law known as "distinction" -- which literally means distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants. This principle would probably preclude the kind of conduct conducted by COL Hogg in Iraq, since the Iraqi Lt. Gen.'s family members are unquestionably non-combatants.

Again, that opinion isn't ironclad: arguably, as Col. Hogg's defenders have pointed out, the wife and daughter were legitimate targets for detention as possible sources of information about the whereabouts of their husband and father.

But Phil, unlike some of the other parties to this debate, notes that the question has moral and operational aspects as well as legal ones:

Doing what's unlawful is one thing; doing something which is counter-productive is quite another. We're trying to rebuild Iraq as a kinder, gentler place -- a nation that contributes to regional stability, economic growth, personal liberty, etc. To accomplish our mission, we need to win the Iraqis' hearts and minds. Kidnapping the wives and daughters of our adversaries is not a way to win hearts and minds -- it's a way to squeeze their private parts. This is the kind of tactic that can backfire, bigtime.

My own view is that threatening women to put pressure on the men who love them is despicable, whether lawful or not. (Yes, I know American prosecutors do it almost routinely, though the threats are of criminal prosecution rather than of indefinite detention, and I don't approve of that, either.) I assume that Glenn Reynolds agrees; if not, he should explain why.

But whether Glenn agrees or not on the moral proposition, he seriously misleads his readers when he describes this situation summarily as "a U.S. 'war crime' that wasn't." Not only is it still an open question whether a crime was committed, but the source he refers to makes it clear that the question is still an open one.

When is the Titan of the Blogosphere going to start to hold himself to the same standards of accurate reporting he expects of the New York Times or the BBC?

Update: Glenn Reynolds, who has a remarkably thin skin for someone so gleeful in his condemnation of others, makes a big fuss about a spelling error (corrected above), agrees that he was wrong on substance, and never tells us what he thinks of the morality of forcing a man to do what you want by seizing, and threatening to hold, his wife and daughter.

Glenn is right to point out that the conventions of blogging, which require links to sources, provide more safeguards against misquotation than the conventions of mainstream journalism.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 06:10 AM | |

Speaking of the capacity of real-money betting markets to predict actual events, no one seems to have noticed that the Iowa elections market (*) has Bush's re-election at roughly even money. People with their own money at stake don't seem to agree with the conventional wisdom that he's nearly unbeatable.

Pollkatz has a useful graphic (*), easier to interpret than day-to-day poll results. Right now, Bush seems to be just slightly above where he was just before invading Iraq, which in turn was just slightly above where he was just before 9-11. So far, he's had two peaks: right after 9-11, and right after the invasion of Iraq. And the slopes down from those peaks seem to be equal and fairly consistent, at about 1% per month.

There's no way to guess whether that trend will continue now that Bush's numbers have come back to earth. Most of the people who are for him now were for him before 9-11, and you'd expect that support to be harder and less likely to erode than the rally-round-the-flag support. On the other hand, it's striking how much less the Iraq invasion did for Bush's popularity than Desert Storm did for his father's.

In any case, the Pollkatz graph is more consistent with the Iowa numbers than either is with the conventional wisdom.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 05:17 AM | |

From Imprints, via a link from Crooked Timber: the one, the only, Michael Walzer. (To those of you who never took Walzer's seminar on Hobbes, all I can say is that you bear your almost intolerable deprivation with more cheerfulness than I could muster, were I in your shoes.)

Here are my favorite bits from the current interview. But read it in full. Then read Obligations.

It is a good idea to strengthen the UN and to take whatever steps are possible to establish a global rule of law. It is a very bad idea to pretend that a strong UN and a global rule of law already exist.

So far as justice, that is, moral legitimacy is concerned, if the Iraq war was unjust before the Security Council voted, it would have been unjust afterwards, however the vote went. It can't be the case that when we try to figure out whether a war is just or unjust, we are predicting how the Council will vote.

After 9/11, those of us who want to defend civil liberties have to accept a greater burden than before. It isn't enough to point to The Patriot Act and scream 'Fascism!' We have to make the case to our fellow citizens that the government can defend them against terrorism within the constitutional constraints, whatever they are, that we believe necessary to personal freedom and democratic politics. Only if we can't make that case would we have to consider modifying the constitutional regime. Right now, I think that we can make the case; I only regret that so many people on the left don't believe that they have to make it. They talk about this question as if the last thing they want to worry about is the safety of their fellow citizens.

I think that one great mistake of contemporary academic philosophers, starting with Rawls himself, is the claim that our natural endowments are 'arbitrary from a moral point of view' and should not be allowed to have effects in the social world – or, better, the effects they have should never be philosophically ratified. As Rawls wrote, we have to 'nullify the accidents of natural endowment.' This puts philosophy radically at odds with ordinary morality. Sometimes, of course, that is a useful conflict, but in this particular encounter, philosophy does not fare well. Our natural endowments make us what we are, and what we are necessarily has consequences in the social world, and some, at least, of these consequences must be legitimate. John Rawls deserved the honours he won by writing A Theory of Justice – even if his intelligence was an accidental effect of the natural lottery.

The Green Party campaign in 2000 was a very bad idea, the product in part of Ralph Nader's narcissism and in part of old left sectarianism. The sharp right turn of American politics is the direct result of that campaign.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:23 AM | |
Thread: John Lott

Since crime competes with licit work for the time of ex-offenders released from prison, and since literacy contributes statistically both to the chance of getting a job and to the wages available, it stands to reason that improving the reading skills of inmates would tend to reduce their recidivism. That appears to be the case; graduates of prison literacy programs are about 20% less likely than otherwise similar non-graduates to return to prison.

Since the cost of a typical prison literacy program is only about $1000 per inmate, if that difference reflected a real program effect prison literacy programs would be among the most cost-effective crime-fighting techniques, preventing serious crimes at a cost of about $2000 per crime averted. Preventing crime by just building more prisons costs at least half again as much.

[I learned about this from my students Audrey Bazos and Jessica Hausman, who wrote a prize-winning master’s project on the topic.*]

Moreover, even a modest reduction in reincarceration, far smaller than the published estimates, would make literacy programs better than a break-even proposition in purely fiscal terms. The cost saving to a typical state the state from avoiding a two-year prison term is between $40,000 and $50,000; a program that costs $1000 only needs to reduce the recidivism rate by two or three percentage points to pay for itself in reduced reincarceration costs alone.

But in the absence of a true random-assignment experiment, it’s hard to know how much of the measured difference in recidivism between program graduates and other inmates reflects the factors that lead some inmates, but not others, to enter literacy programs and stick with them, rather than the effects of the programs themselves.

An experimental test of this idea would be conceptually simple and operationally manageable. Identify a group of, say, 400 serious offenders within a few months of scheduled prison release. Randomly identify half of them, and use some combination of program availability, persuasion, and incentives to attempt to raise the participation of that group, but not of the control group, in literacy training. Use automated criminal history systems to track reincarceration, and compare the two groups: not just the graduates of the literacy program, but everyone in the group randomly selected for aggressive "marketing" of literacy training.

For example: in California prisons, educational programs and work programs are scheduled for the same time slots. Prisoners who don't get money from their families or friends -- who tend to be the poorest, most socially disconnected, and least literate, and who have therefore among the highest recidivism rates -- need to work for canteen money, and therefore can't take reading classes. By selecting a group of such inmates, dividing it randomly in half, and offering to pay the inmates in one half the pennies per hour they would otherwise be earning in prison jobs to learn to read instead, one could boost participation in the "experimental" group and not in the "control" group, without the moral onus of assigning anyone to a no-treatment condition.

Even if operational or ethical concerns made random assignment infeasible, it would be possible to design interventions to raise the rate of literacy-training participation in one or a few prisons, and use as controls inmates of other, similar prisons or releasees from those same prisons in the period before the program started.

With somewhat greater difficulty and expense, the outcome measures could be expanded past reincarceration to cover workplace and family functioning, physical and psychological health, and self-reported crime.

One reason for the rather sad performance of most in-prison rehabilitation efforts is that they focus on behavioral change. In creating behavioral change, environment matters: talking to someone about not using drugs when he’s in prison may have little effect on his drug use when he’s out of prison. Because literacy is a set of skills rather than a set of behaviors, it seems likely to be much more portable.

It is a sad fact about American politics that "crime" as a political issue has very little to do with figuring out ways to actually reduce victimization or the criminal riskiness of various social environments. Even if it were true, as I think it probably is, that putting a million dollars into prison literacy programs would prevent substantially more crimes than putting that same million dollars into locking up another forty inmates for a year, a politician who preferred literacy programs to prison construction would bear the politically devastating label "soft on crime."

[Mitch Daniels, before he started running for governor of Indiana, when he was still helping GWB wreck the fiscal stability of the federal government as his first OMB Director, specified the teensy program of Federal aid to state prison literacy programs as one of the things that ought to be cut to restore balance to the budget. (*) Anyone who can close a twelve-significant-figure deficit by cutting an seven-significant-figure program shouldn't be wasting his time in the public service; he should be out there in the private sector running Ponzi schemes. But of course the point of his proposal wasn't to save money, but to indicate his dedication to the holy cause of making bad people suffer.]

So it would be fatuous to imagine that just showing that funding prison literacy programs is cost-effective crime control will magically make those programs popular.

Still, there is some benefit to knowing whether prison literacy is as good a deal socially as it appears to be. Anyone who knows of a corrections official who might let his or her institution be used as an experimental venue will earn my gratitude by putting me in touch with that person.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:42 AM | |
Thread: Crime Control

To no one's surprise but Andrew Sullivan's, George W. Bush has decided to ride the anti-gay backlash that seems to have developed as a result of Lawrence v. Texas. (Not that Bush isn't compassionate, you understand; he wants us all to be nice to gays, no matter how sinful they are.*)

I'm sure this decision was adequately focus-grouped, and that therefore it will be helpful to Bush in 2004. Longer-term, though, I'm not so certain. Pete Wilson's immigrant-bashing worked perfectly for him in 1994, but had the side-effect of turning the California state government over to the Democrats in 1998, seemingly for keeps.

Here's some basis for hope: the CBS News/New York Times poll showing only 40% of all adults supportive of gay marriage, with 55% opposed. But among the 18-31 group, the figures were more than reversed: 61% in favor, only 35% opposed. (With a total sample of 3000, there should be enough 18-31s to make the numbers meaningful.) Support for gay marriage is a declining function of age, like support for legalizing cannabis.

It's possible that some of that is age effect rather than cohort effect; boomers were a lot more supportive of cannabis when they were 18-31 then they are now, and the same sort of process may work on issues of sexual liberty. But I wouldn't bet on it. And George W. Bush just did: not for himself, but for his party.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 10:51 PM | |

[A friend asked for a review of the bidding for non-bloggers. Here it is. It omits references to blogs except where the blog itself is a source of fresh information, since the objective is to tell the story rather than to distribute credit. The thread of my posts on the affair, which includes the links to other blogs, starts here.]

Joseph Wilson IV is the former Ambassador to Gabon (and associate director of the NSC for Africa) sent to Niger last year by the CIA to investigate the claim that the Iraqi regime had tried to buy yellowcake there: the claim that showed up as the famous "16 words" in the January State of the Union Address.

Having concluded that there had probably been no such purchase attempt, and having so reported at the time, Wilson kept his silence about his mission until after Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported in June (*) that "a former ambassador" had gone on the mission. In early July, Wilson wrote the op-ed in the New York Times (*) that launched the story of the missing uranium into major media attention.

Thereafter, the administration, with help from journalistic allies, appears to have launched a coordinated attack on Wilson. (*)

On July 14, Robert Novak's column (*) carried the assertion that Wilson had been recruited for the mission at the instance of his wife, the former Valerie Plame. That assertion was sourced to "two senior administration officials," and was accompanied by the unsourced assertion that "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Neither assertion was central to the story, whose thrust was that the Wilson mission was so minor, and handled at such a low level within the CIA, that it never reached the people around the President who decided what would go into the State of the Union Address.

"Senior official" is generally understood to mean Executive Level II or above: i.e., someone at the rank of at least Deputy Secretary, or someone of equivalent responsibility in the White House. The number of senior administration officials, so defined, who might have been sources for the information Novak reported does not exceed twenty.

David Corn then reported in the Nation (*), and Newsday later confirmed (*), that Valerie Plame Wilson works covertly for the CIA, apparently under cover as an energy analyst for a consulting firm (not yet identified in the press). After some equivocal remarks in which he refused to comment on his wife's status but said that, if in fact she had been covert, revealing her identity was a security breach comparable to those associated with Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames, Wilson confirmed that she was indeed covert in an interview on the NBC Nightly News.

In addition to putting an end to Valerie Plame Wilson's operational usefulness, the revelation of her identity poses a substantial, perhaps even mortal, threat to whatever foreign officials might have been supplying here with information about their nations' attempts to create WMD capacity. That will tend to have a discouraging effect on future agent recruitment efforts. Thus, unlike most violations of security regulations, "outing" Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA officer could well have caused palpable damage to US national security.

Revealing the identity of a covert CIA officer appears to be in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, codified as 50 U.S.C., Section 421 (a) or (b):

Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources:

Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified
information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined not more than $50,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That language would seem to cover revealing Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, though Representative Rob Simmons (R.-CT), himself a former CIA official, asserted to The Hill (*) that such revelations were against the law only if they formed part of a pattern. Mr. Simmons seems to have confused two different sections of the law: a non-official, such as a journalist, is vulnerable only for a pattern of such activity under 421 (c); but an official who gets the information and leaks it is criminally liable for even a single act under 421 (a) or (b). Rep. Simmons's eagerness to offer an interpretation that would legalize disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer may suggest his concern that some of his political allies had just done so.

Whether Valerie Plame Wilson was a "covert agent" for the purposes of the statute seems to depend on where and when she has been stationed, and on the definition of "service outside the United States."

Sec. 426

The term "covert agent" means -

(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency -

(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and

(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States;

Whether someone whose duty station was in the U.S. but traveled abroad on intelligence business counts as "serving abroad" isn't obvious from the text. No one has yet published any information about Valerie Plame Wilson's postings or travels.

Senator Schumer has written to FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for an investigation. Calls for Congressional investigations have come from, among others, Senators Rockefeller, Durbin, and Daschle. Governor Howard Dean included a pointed question about the affair in a list of 16 questions for the President (*) about WMD-related matters.

Only Newsday among major media outlets has been covering the story consistently. NBC had an interview with Joseph Wilson, and CBS a commentary sharply critical of the Administration. Paul Krugman mentioned the affair in his column. Otherwise, the major print and electronic media have been largely silent, not even covering the Schumer letter or the Dean statement.

Scott McClellan, the White House Press Secretary, has been asked about the situation in two of his daily briefings (*), and has replied only in generalities:

That is not the way that this White House operates. That's not the way the President operates. And certainly, I first became aware of those news reports when we were contacted by reporters and the questions were raised. It's the first I had heard of those. No one would be authorized to do that within this White House. That is simply not the way we operate, and that's simply not the way the President operates.

McClellan refused to say that he had made, or would make, any inquiry about who might have leaked the information to Novak. This apparent indifference is in sharp contrast with attention paid last year to the possible leakage of information from the Congressional 9-11 inquiry (*). The Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires an annual report the to the Congress, which may make it harder for the Administration to simply ignore the potential scandal. George Tenet has also been silent. The FBI has yet to say whether it will investigate this situation. It has been reported (*) that the CIA is launching an inquiry.

It seems almost certain that Valerie Plame Wilson was an undercover CIA officer and that her identity was revealed by senior officials of the Bush Administration. What seems much more obscure is why that was done. Joseph Wilson has asserted that the motive was to punish him for speaking out in a way that embarrassed the White House and to deter others from doing so. Even granting that as a motive, it seems hard to fathom why senior officials would reveal the identity of an undercover CIA officer, and do so in a way that was likely to be traced back, if not to them personally, at least to the Bush Administration.

One possibility not discussed so far in print is that the senior officials who spoke to Novak knew that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA officer, but not that she was undercover. Given the tensions between the CIA and the White House, such a failure of communication would be inexcusable but not incomprehensible.

The relative obscurity of the story, and in particular the lack of reportage by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the newsmagazines, seems surprising. To date, no one has come up with an innocent explanation of the facts; the administration's usual defenders are largely giving this story the silent treatment. If there are guilty parties they, in all probability, senior national security officials of the Bush Administration. The lack of any comment from normally very security-minded administration over a serious breach of security lends further support to the interpretation that high officials were involved.

Update The MinuteMan reports that Joseph Wilson continues to equivocate about his wife's covert status. He also reports that Wilson's findings from Niger, as Wilson originally described them, were that there had been no actual sale of yellowcake from Niger to Iraq, rather than that there had been no Iraqi attempt to purchase. I think we now know that she was covert, independent of what her husband says. As to what was or wasn't in his yellowcake report, that's neither here nor there as far as the apparent crime of blowing a CIA officer's cover is concerned.

<strong>Second update Wilson names Rove as the culprit. [*]

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 04:07 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Josh Marshall reports (*), without saying more, that the CIA appears to be investigating the revelation of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. No more than one should have expected, but good news nonetheless.

Thanks to the MinuteMan for the link.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 01:48 PM | |
Thread: Valerie Plame

Elisabeth Riba notes (*) that the law criminalizing the unmasking of covert agents requires an annual report by the President on what he's been doing to protect those identities and
on any other relevant matters. No one seems to know when the anniversary date is, but if I were a Senator I'd want to find out.

Posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:05 PM | |