Month: April 2011

Ammar Abdulhamid remarks on the rumors pouring out of Deraa:

The reports tell of a few defections from the ranks of the 5th Division mushrooming into a full-fledged mutiny, when few high-ranking officers decided that defecting is not enough and that they had a duty to protect the city and its unarmed residents from the vicious assault of pro-Assad troops making up the 4th Division and lead by none other than Maher Al-Assad, the brother of the titular president.  

The reports do not stop here, but go on to tell of the capture or at least trapping of Maher al-Assad, and one Rustom Ghazali, the acting chief of political security assigned to deal with the protests in Deraa. Al Jazeera even aired eyewitness testimony confirming some aspects of this, while the Syrian opposition channel, Barada TV, seemed to endorse the reports as factual. Facebook chat groups are naturally abuzz at this stage.

Al Jazeera's lead story is on opposition groups gearing up for resistance. Rolling updates here.

Yesterday, Ben Smith doubted that a purality of Republicans truly question Obama's birthplace. Ben favorably quotes ABC pollster Gary Langer:

"I think these measurements are not really reflecting 'belief' in the true sense of the phrase," [Langer] said. "Many people are expressing their opinion rather than an assertion of factual reality. People who don’t like you are going to take an opportunity to send a message…. They’re simply taking advantge of an opportunity to express antipathy toward him."

John Sides addressed this theory last week and found little evidence for it. Nate Silver analyzes a new Gallup/USA Today poll that finds "significant doubt" that Trump was born in the US:

I’d imagine that you could substitute virtually any name in the place of Mr. Trump or Mr. Obama — Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, or Oprah Winfrey, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Sarah Palin — and find that at least a few Americans reported themselves to be “birthers.”

The incidence of birtherism also tends to be higher in automated surveys, like those put out by Public Policy Polling. That could be because automated surveys tend to draw a less representative sample, with more extreme partisans and ideologues than exist in the real world, or because respondents feel especially inclined to have “fun” with the pollsters when they just have to push buttons rather than talk to another human being.

Clearly, some people do believe the lies and distortions about Mr. Obama’s birthplace; I’m just not sure that the fraction is as great as overly-literal readings of these surveys might suggest.

Ackerman has an extensive post and a response from the Pentagon (an unconvincing blanket denial of any wrongdoing). My original post from yesterday evening here. A reader writes:

I have been reading the Dish for several years now and I applaud your continued persistence regarding our country’s need to dismantle the policies that have been created to allow our government to torture people – and to hold accountable those who created these policies and those who tortured. As a former Army physician who was proud of my prior service in Afghanistan (once) and Iraq (twice), I am now dismayed.  Every man and woman I served with in combat-support hospitals and forward surgical teams treated all patients – U.S. or coalition soldiers, local civilians, or enemies who wanted us dead – with decency and compassion. The wounded were all injured human beings worthy of respect and care, regardless of who they were. 

This latest report sickens me as much as the Abu Ghraib photos sickened me. 

The failure of military medical personnel at GTMO not only denigrates my service, it colors all of us.  Regardless of the honor in our service, history may color us with the same brush that these health professionals are colored.  The footnote – that those who allowed torture of human beings under their very noses were a relatively small number of health professionals among hundreds of honorable ones – will be lost with time.  None of us should feel clean while this goes on.

Our reader's point about providing one standard of care is illustrated in a 2005 report on the ethical quandaries that medical personnel faced in Iraq:

Army Col. Olga Rodriguez, RN, chief nurse of the 228th Combat Support Hospital (CSH) that was stationed in Mosul, Iraq, for a year, says at any given time 80% of the patients in the hospital were non-U.S. service members. … The mandate from the Army Medical Department and the Department of Defense is that all Iraqi patients receive the same level and quality of care as any U.S. service member, says Rodriguez [.]

Providing care to Iraqi civilians, some of whom might be insurgents, sometimes causes ethical conflicts for military nurses. The instinct of a military nurse might be to provide care for a U.S. soldier first, but that response is inappropriate if a civilian patient’s condition is more urgent. … Navy Cmdr. Cheryl R. Ruff, RN, a nurse in Iraq during the first months of the war, says patients who medical personnel first thought were Iraqi civilians sometimes turned out to be [enemy prisoners of war]. “We treated a lot of EPWs,” Ruff says.

Another reader writes:

Your post brought to mind more than simply the troubling acquiescence of some in the medical community to the torture regime implemented there.  There is a broader question: what about all of the service people at Gitmo and what happens to them when they are separated from the service?

How do we integrate men and women desensitized to torture and the abuse of human rights back into society as a whole?  Do former guards and interrogators go out and join law enforcement agencies, as so many ex-military do?  How do they reintegrate their military experience into their civilian responsibilities?  If they become FBI agents or police officers, can they put aside their experience in the torture regime and operate within civilian law?

The true crime of the torture regime is not, it seems to me, the horror that it perpetrates on our prisoners – as terrible as that certainly is. The true crime is what it does to all the military and civilians exposed to it and the weakening of the surface commitment to human rights that keeps a society like ours civil and democratic.  Those willing to torture to protect the state will always be willing to take extra measures to protect the state – or the state as they see it.

Krugman gives us a graph:

What you see are the core drivers of Obama's spending – an understandable jump in money spent on recession-era safety nets. Much of this is automatic. The collapse in revenues and the debt explosion of the last couple of years have been almost entirely due to the recession which Obama inherited, and increasing costs from entitlements programs which Obama did not invent.

This is pretty obvious. Which is why, almost immediately upon his coming to office, propagandists like Glenn Reynolds used projected debt levels to indict Obama for being a leftist.

An appeal from Johann Hari.

“I think the media is loving this because they want to make Birthers as they call people who are just curious about the President of the United States and his background, and his associations, and his consistency with what he says today versus what he said in both the memoirs that he wrote, or Bill Ayers or whomever wrote. Uh the media is, is loving the fact that some curious Americans are actually asking the questions, and they’re trying to make those curious Americans sound kind of crazy so the media is loving this issue and they’re perpetuating this issue trying to make it sound really worse than it is,” – Sarah Palin, apparently without irony.

Has he been revealed as a fool? Or vindicated by getting the president to produce the full document? A little of both, don't you think? But from the press's point of view, we must surely be glad to have more data, rather than less, no?

Here, by the way, courtesy of TNC, are the legal rules for publicly producing such a detailed document:

The department shall not permit inspection of public health statistics records, or issue a certified copy of any such record or part thereof, unless it is satisfied that the applicant has a direct and tangible interest in the record.

As TNC notes, "direct and tangible interest" means the registrant, an agent of the registrant, their parents, spouse and some others. So Obama had every reason and capacity as both the person whose birth certificate is on record, let alone as president of the US, to have done this months ago. But he decided to play rope-a-dope instead.

We now have a clear precedent of a public official not just producing the core document to disprove a conspiracy theory, but further documents to back himself up. Here’s the audio transcript – from a must-read post by Philip Munger – where Palin first says she agrees with this kind of public scrutiny and transparency – and claims she has produced a birth certificate for her son – when she hasn’t. She doubled down on this position yesterday on her propaganda channel, Fox, interviewed by the wife of her lawyer, Greta van Susteren. Here’s her take in December 2009. On Obama’s birth certificate:

HUMPHRIES: Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

PALIN: Um, I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?

PALIN: I think it’s a fair question…

And on the equivalent test applied to her:

HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

PALIN: Hey, you know, that’s a great point. That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn’t my real son, a lot of people say, “Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he’s your kid,” which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on the other one.

My italics. But even when a public official says she has produced medical records and a birth certificate to prove her maternity (and has no objection to the process), and she hasn’t, the MSM refuses to ask for them and stigmatizes those who do.

Can we at least be consistent here? Can the press actually demand maximum available, empirical information related to all empirical questions surrounding public figures rather than inhibiting their release?