Politics

Remember the Policy Awareness Market? It was a DARPA-backed plan to establish a “futures” market wagering on the likelihood of terrorist attacks, assassinations, and the like that almost slipped under the radar until being outed and subsequently shut down last July.

The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

[…]

The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A website promoting the plan already is available.

When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic senators Monday, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans.

Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking into the program and would report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), said she was appalled to hear of plans to set up “a futures market in death.”

Other Democrats expressed similar alarm.

“The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), one of two lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday.

Well, guess what? It’s back! Apparently it’s now being run without government involvement, but the idea is still incredibly sick and wrong.

(via Daily Kos)

Incredible. Among the list of concessions that the US wanted from Britain in preparation for Bush’s upcoming visit were Tube closures, minigun battlefield weaponry to use against rioters, and diplomatic immunity for American agents in case protesters are shot.

Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush’s entourage this week.

In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush’s protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed.

The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.

These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters.

While these outrageous requests were turned down, the UK has agreed to create a ‘sterile zone’ extending for blocks around the President’s travel plan to keep people away.

What’s more disturbing? The fact that we have an administration with the unmitigated gall to make such requests in the first place? Or the fact that we have a President who is so mistrusted, disliked, and outright hated by so many people that they feel the need for that level of security?

(via Atrios)

According to The New Republic, it’s looking more and more like we practically have two feuding Democratic parties now: Clinton’s version and Dean’s version.

The division in the party over Dean is less about ideology than about power. Three years after Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary still control what remains of a Democratic establishment. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was installed by Clinton. Most of the powerful new fund-raising groups, known as 527s, and the new think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress, are run by the best and brightest of the Clinton administration. As National Journal noted in a detailed look at what it called “Hillary Inc.,” the senator’s network of fund-raising organizations “has begun to assume a quasi-party status.” And some of the best Clinton talent is heavily invested in non-Dean campaigns, especially Joe Lieberman’s (Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn), John Edwards’s (Bruce Reed), and Wesley Clark’s (Bruce Lindsey, Eli Segal, and Mickey Kantor).

Dean, by contrast, has come to represent the party’s anti-establishment forces. While the other candidates, especially former self-styled front-runner John Kerry, started the campaign by wooing party leaders, Dean built a grassroots army first–in part by bashing D.C. Democrats and their disastrous 2002 election strategy–and is only now leveraging his fund-raising power to win over establishment types. No Democrats closely associated with the Clintons are working for the Dean campaign. In fact, it’s hard to find a Clintonite who speaks favorably of the former Vermont governor. This evident schism is not just about Dean’s opposition to the war–or even his prospects in the general election. It’s a turf war to decide who will control the future of the party.

It’s an interesting look at where the Democratic party is headed, and there’s some more good analysis at the Daily Kos. It’s my hope that the “old-school” Clinton faction will recognize the strength of what Dean and his campaign are building by getting people — “real” people, not just big-money people — interested, excited and involved. Otherwise, continued rivalry could end up costing us 2004, and four more years of Bush is the last thing this country needs.

I’ve been something of a low-level fan of Gore Vidal for quite a while now. I say “low-level” simply because every time I’ve seen him in something (such as Bob Roberts, where most of his political ruminations were unscripted and entirely his) or read interviews with him, I’ve liked what he has to say, and yet I’ve not read any of his books (something which I’d really like to correct sometime soon).

The LA Weekly currently has an interview with Gore Vidal which is well worth reading, touching on everything from what our founding fathers might think of Bush and his cronies to electronic voting. Some very good stuff in there.

But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman’s founding of the national-security state, to LBJ’s debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

(via /.)

It’s about damn time.

Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.

The court said it would resolve only the jurisdictional question of whether the federal courts can hear such a challenge and not, at this stage, whether these detentions are in fact unconstitutional. Even so, the action was an unmistakable rebuff of the Bush administration’s insistence that the detainees’ status was a question “constitutionally committed to the executive branch” and not the business of the federal courts, as Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued in opposition to Supreme Court review.

And in what may be a good sign, it looks like the Supreme Court has decided to play hardball with this case, and make sure that their decision is final:

It was evident on Monday that this, too, was a question on which the justices want to have the final word. That conclusion emerged from a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining “aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”

The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to “the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.” The court’s question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not “outside the sovereign territory of the United States.”

These people have been locked up for over a year and a half, with no legal counsel, no recourse, no charges. With little more than an accusation, they were tossed into a prison out of the public eye where the US could take advantage of the unusual and unclear legal standing of the base to essentially do whatever they wanted without fear of recourse. It’s long past time for this to stop, and for Guantánamo’s prisoners to be given the basic rights that any other prisoner is guaranteed.

Much as I may dislike Rumsfeld (along with the rest of the Bush administration), I always figured he at least had some amount of intelligence. But this latest “I didn’t say that” spiel is nothing short of ludicrous…

…on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

“Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?” Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS’ “The News Hour.”

“There is no question but that they would be welcomed,” Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. “Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do.”

[…]

But on Sept. 25, – a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier – Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.

“Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms,” Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off. “Never said that,” he said. “Never did. You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody else. You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said.”

Does Rummy really think he’ll be able to get away with claiming that he didn’t say these things? In today’s ‘net connected world, anything said on the public record is there for good once it propagates into news stories posted across the ‘net.

If Rummy’s memory is really that bad, perhaps Google could help him refresh it with results like this PBS transcript of the interview with Jim Lehrer that the quote comes from. Or this Department of Defense transcript of the same interview.

Let’s try that “You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said,” statement again, shall we?

(via Will)