Refuting George W.

At the risk of seeming partisan, I'd like to take a minute to highlight three or four areas that demonstrate the absolute corruption and incompentence of the current US administration. This is a difficult combination to maintain, so it may be that it's all corruption masked behind George W.'s "Aw, shucks" act.

1. Administration corruption.

It is difficult to argue that the Medicare reforms passed last year were anything but a shady deal. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution offers this piece on actuary Richard Foster, who allegedly was told that he would be fired if he notified congress that the administration had low-balled the cost estimates.

According to Foster, Medicare administrator Thomas Scully, who rode herd over the legislation for the White House, ordered Foster not to talk to members of Congress without his authorization. If he revealed the high figures, he risked losing his job, according to reports. Foster was barred from giving the real numbers not only to Democrats but also to Republicans such as Rep. Bill Thomas, a Californian who chairs the powerful tax writing Ways and Means Committee.

The purpose of withholding the information, clearly, was to keep lawmakers in the dark. Several Republicans, especially, had expressed reservations about the proposal when the Bush administration told them it would cost $400 billion over 10 years. They might not have given it their votes had they known the real costs. As it happened, the legislation squeaked by in the House in a 220-215 predawn vote.

The New York Times (registration required; apparently using Plastic/Plastic to log in will work) discusses a fax recieved in January but dated June 11, 2003 which marked the price as $551.5 billion over 10 years, not the $400 billion that congress nearly didn't pass.

It appeared to confirm what Ms. Bjorklund [a House Democratic Health Policy aide] and her bosses on the House Ways and Means Committee had long suspected: the actuary, Richard S. Foster, had concluded the legislation would be far more expensive than Congress's $400 billion estimate — and had kept quiet while lawmakers voted on the bill and President Bush signed it into law.

Ms. Bjorklund had been pressing Mr. Foster for his numbers since June. When he refused, telling her he could be fired, she said, she confronted his boss, Thomas A. Scully, then the Medicare administrator. "If Rick Foster gives that to you," Ms. Bjorklund remembered Mr. Scully telling her, "I'll fire him so fast his head will spin." Mr. Scully denies making such threats.

These conversations among three government employees — an obscure Congressional aide, a little-known actuary and a high-level official — remained secret until now, and Ms. Bjorklund still does not know who sent the fax. But Mr. Foster went public last week, and details of his struggle for independence within the Bush administration are now emerging, raising questions about whether the White House intentionally withheld crucial data from lawmakers.

If true, this is clear-cut corruption within the administration. An official was allegedly threatened in order to damaging cost estimates from making their way to the Congress while important legislation was being debated.

And then there's this great story of the Medicare bill:

The House Ethics Committee said Wednesday that it will begin an investigation to determine whether Rep. Nick Smith was offered a bribe to vote for a Medicare bill.

Smith was among several lawmakers lobbied heavily by GOP leaders last November to vote for the measure, which was favored by President Bush. It narrowly passed, but Smith voted against it because he said it was too expensive.

After the vote, Smith told a radio station that Republican colleagues had offered $100,000 in campaign cash for his son, Brad, if he voted for the bill. The younger Smith is running to replace his father, who is retiring.

This is not the administration per se, but it is surrogates among the President's own party who were allegedly using tactics that exceed "hardball" by a pretty decent margin in order to pass Bush's signature domestic legislation (after tax cuts). It's also criminal, and my best hope is that Tom DeLay can be tied to this and then prosecuted.

2. The World is Safer Now

The death toll rose to 201 yesterday as another victim of the Madrid bombings died of injuries. Car bombs are the new rocket propelled grenade in Iraq. No, they're still using RPG's, too, I'm sure, but I can't even keep count of the civillian casualties in Iraq. Fortunately, the blast in Baghdad yesterday that was originally thought to have killed 27 seems to have killed far fewer people, possibly as few as six, which is probably no consolation for the families of those six, but I'm a citizen of the occupying power. I have a different perspective.

Then there are moments when you really get to look into George W. Bush's soul. In this video, we get to watch the President sit with the Dutch Prime Minister, who issues an eloquent call for the world to stand shoulder to shoulder before they begin to take questions from the press. Hang out for the first press question, to President Bush. Watch the smirk and the poorly suppressed grin as he describes the terrorists as killers and murderers. It's truly a weird piece of film.

This is from the man who has pledged to make the world safer by taking the war to the terrorists. Didn't Madrid prove what Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali, and other terrorist hits have suggested in the last three years: that the terrorists will strike their targets of choice at the time of their choosing?

There was no "chatter" leading up to this event, so it seems that even the president's emphasis on high tech intelligence and wire taps isn't doing the job. We are no safer, we can't protect our allies, and in the nation that would greet us as liberators, civilians die daily in violence that repudiates the military tactics of George W. Bush.

3. Afghanistan is Free

I'm an Army Brat, and I grew up chatting with my father about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This was dinnertime conversation in my Reagan-era household, and I was well aware of the actions of the CIA and the military to bolster the Mujahadeen to help throw off the Red Army.

Of course, once they did that, we (the good guys) abandoned Afghanistan and left the country a well armed battlefield of radical militias. It is estimated that 50,000 people died from the fighting in Kabul alone between 1992-1996. 400,000 are thought to have died in the country in the 1990s.

This is an atrocity beyond comprehension. The United States used the people of Afghanistan and then threw them aside when our own objectives were reasonably met. 9-11, seen through that lens, is less incomprehensible. We are not the good guys we like to think of ourselves as.

When we began the war against the Taliban, I saw it as an opportunity to really deal with these past wrongs, and to forge a permanent commitment with and to Afghanistan. I was hopeful that George Bush would live up to his rhetoric, and that his radical and liberal war against a brutal theocracy would result in genuine democracy and progress in Afghanistan.

My cynicism sprouts from beliefs like these.

I am directing you to Google's News Search/Keyword: Afghanistan. Spend a little while reading and absorbing. Here is a thought provoking essay out of Pakistan, which says in part:

The borders where the boundaries of Afghanistan end thereafter start the limits of non-Afghanistan in all its four dimensions—including Guantanomo Bay. Hence, if an Afghani is in Afghanistan or in the Bay, there is hardly any difference—as the sense of humiliation is similar. The spirit of the ‘non-Geneva Convention’ is in its full fury. For that matter, an Afghani will never forget two years. One was the year 1991 when a former superpower stepped out from it, and the second was the year 2001 when the remaining superpower stepped in.

Reuters reports that the Taliban, reconstituted in the south and east of the country, has just appointed a new chief to lead anti-US operations. This wasn't supposed to happen.

Here's a Kiwi's-eye view of the situation on the ground.

I visited Afghanistan for the first time earlier this year. In a lifetime of making my way through places of upheaval, I had not seen anything like it. Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and heat their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to mark “Year Zero”.

There is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan. My footsteps echoed through the once grand Dilkusha Palace, built in 1910 to a design by a British architect, whose circular staircase and Corinthian columns and stone frescoes of biplanes were celebrated. It is now a cavernous ruin from which reed-thin children emerge like small phantoms, offering yellowing postcards of what it looked like 30 years ago. Beneath the sweep of the staircase were the blood and flesh of two people blown up by a bomb the day before. Who were they? Who planted the bomb? In a country in thrall to warlords, many of them conniving in terrorism, the question itself is surreal.

A hundred metres away, men in blue move stiffly in single file: mine-clearers. Mines are like litter here, killing and maiming, it is calculated, every hour of every day. Opposite what was Kabul's main cinema, today an art deco shell, there is a busy roundabout with posters warning that unexploded cluster bombs — “yellow and from USA” — are in the vicinity. Children play here, chasing each other into the shadows. They are watched by a teenage boy with a stump and part of his face missing.

It goes on. You don't want it to, but it does.

In a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July, Human Rights Watch has documented atrocities “committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001” and who have “essentially hijacked the country”. The report describes army and police troops controlled by the warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons the widespread rape of women, girls and boys routine extortion, robbery and arbitrary murder. Girls' schools are burned down. “Because the soldiers are targeting women and girls”, the report says, “many are staying indoors, making it impossible for them to attend school [or] go to work”.

In the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they drive they are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even an unrelated taxi driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a “chastity test”, squandering precious medical services to which, says Human Rights Watch, “women and girls have almost no access, particularly in Herat, where fewer than one per cent of women give birth with a trained attendant”. The death rate of mothers giving birth is the highest in the world, according to UNICEF. Herat is ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld endorsed as “an appealing man... thoughtful, measured and self-confident”.

You should read the full article. Then you should read Nicholas Kristof's Abandoning Afghanistan.

This is our government. Corrupt, lying, and abandoning the some of the weakest, most devestated people on Earth, people we said we would help to rise up after decades of war. This is our government, with a smirking gangster all but chuckling about murderers and their victims. This is our government, and if we elect to keep it in November, we are all complicit in this behavior and all responsible for these crimes.