Why Is Current Taking No Heat Over Euna Lee And Laura Ling?

I suspected this to be the case.

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4 -- One woman approached China's border with North Korea as a seasoned foreign correspondent, the other as a sharp editor who was on her first trip abroad in her new role as a producer.

I knew Euna Lee as an editor. Her first producing assignment was to go to... North Korea? And the only possible reason for that is that she spoke Korean and grew up in Seoul.

This is not to say that she's not a smart person, or that she is overly aggressive. And yes, someone fluent in Korean would be helpful in chronicling the story. But in the field, the producer makes the decisions. The "seasoned foreign correspondent" does not. And so Current TV sent a first-time producer to perhaps the most dangerous place on Earth. They played on her ambition and figured just anyone who spoke Korean and who they could pay cheaply would do. And when things went catastrophically wrong, they shut their traps about it and censored material on their website. Now that they've been released, it's a Laura Ling film festival on Current.

(That whole "seasoned foreign correspondent" thing about Laura Ling, by the way? I've seen a couple segments. One has her walking through a 7-11 shop in China picking out different snacks. The story they were sent to do in the border region was about human trafficking. That's several orders of magnitude different.)

The "citizen journalist" model is great and all, but air-dropping unseasoned people into war zones and giving them none of the resources to succeed produces outcomes like this. And it's completely unfair to the two women, who were brave in their ordeal. You have to blame the management decision to send them there. They treat their staff like spare parts, giving them no training or resources, and send them abroad to essentially poke a bear with a sharp stick.

This is not an uninformed armchair opinion, by the way. I know people at Current. OSHA should step in.

...All that said, John Bolton should have offered to serve a substitute sentence of 12 years hard labor in a prison camp if he wants to keep his country's manly neocon manliness intact. I'm sure nobody would miss him.

How obvious was it that Fred Hiatt would ring up Bolton to write an op-ed about this?

Let's Get Them

John Bolton never passes up an opportunity to start another war:

FOX HOST: Ambassador, if you were serving in this administration, would it be your recommendation that they go in to, militarily with air strikes and/or boots on the ground, into these so-called feral cities, where these pirates are taking hold? Should we go in and take those people out, and take their installations out, now, militarily? Is that what you’re suggesting?

BOLTON: Yes. … Unless we go in and really end this problem once and for all, we will simply see it grow over time.

This is the same John Bolton, of course, who opposed the Clinton Administration efforts to prevent a failed state in Somalia.

Bolton isn't completely wrong - the crisis in Somalia absolutely feeds piracy. But a full-scale ground invasion that would FURTHER destabilize the area, if that's possible, clearly won't solve the problem. Unfortunately, I don't think the Administration has the political will to do what's necessary. Yes, they're talking about attacking pirate bases and aiding the Somali government both with economic development support and the kind of funding to go after the problem themselves, and they appear mindful of the need to get local support before doing anything. However there's nothing resembling a comprehensive solution, which would have to include a political accommodation that would be acceptable to a broad consensus of the Somali people, which probably means including the ICU. I'm not saying that would be at all easy to get, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt to try. Which turns the whole situation into a discussion about appropriate levels of military force.

In a related development, Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) saw his plane out of Mogadishu fired upon, allegedly in retaliation for the pirate deaths. Obviously, letting the piracy problems grow to this level means that such attacks are inevitable, but the significant work of nation-building, not nation-destroying, must be the response.

...and, um, this was not a military victory for Obama. Nor was it a military test for Obama. He followed the standard protocols and let the professionals do their work. If that's a victory, fine.

Exile In Condiland

I know that the Administration is trying to put the best face on the disaster they've made of things the last few years, and they're entitled to try, but I would submit to them that they stop using Condi Rice for this purpose. She is the worst liar of the bunch, and the most brazen.

This week, SO FAR, she's claimed that Iran tried to stop the SOFA agreement in Iraq (they, um, didn't, and in fact approved the proposal in the end), she made the argument that no American money was wasted in the reconstruction of Iraq (save, oh, tens of billions documented in a recent report and the $12 billion handed out from the back of a plane), and she decided that the United States has embraced the UN more than any President "maybe ever" (other than appointing a UN Ambassador who thinks that if the UN building lost ten stories it wouldn't make a bit of difference).

There are more examples here and here. Does she know that people are listening when she talks? This woman should be laughed off the Stanford campus when she returns.

Major Internal White House Battle Over Iran

There are a host of conflicting signals coming out of the US on Iran, which suggests a war within the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House itself over whether or not to attack. It's very hard to decipher who is winning this debate. While Cheney usually has the upper hand in these fights (after all, it's his Administration), he's outnumbered these days, more so than when Rumsfeld was at his side. And it appears the commanders are very reluctant to go along with any attack plans for Iran as well.

Let's chart this battle on the flip.

We know that the US announced this week that it plans to engage in bilateral talks with Iran over the Iraq crisis and how it can be managed. But the Vice President was very quick to qualify that the two sides would only be talking with respect to Iraq. On other issues, such as the country's nuclear program, neoconservatives are continuing to press for attack. Take a look at what John Bolton said today:

A nuclear Iran would be as dangerous as “Hitler marching into the Rhineland” in 1936 and should be prevented by Western military strikes if necessary, according to a leading hawk who recently left the Bush administration.

John Bolton, who still has close links to the Bush administration, told The Daily Telegraph that the European Union had to "get more serious" about Iran and recognise that its diplomatic attempts to halt Iran's enrichment programme had failed.

Iran has "clearly mastered the enrichment technology now...they're not stopping, they're making progress and our time is limited", he said. Economic sanctions "with pain" had to be the next step, followed by attempting to overthrow the theocratic regime and, ultimately, military action to destroy nuclear sites.

Mr Bolton's stark warning appeared to be borne out yesterday by leaks about an inspection by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran's main nuclear installation at Natanz on Sunday.

This is eerily similar to the Iraq debate, when neoconservative claims about the need to attack quickly were buttressed by leaked information coming out of the New York Times, possibly provided by the same group of people that are quoting it.

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials [...]

In a short-notice inspection of Iran’s operations in the main nuclear facility at Natanz on Sunday, conducted in advance of a report to the United Nations Security Council due early next week, the inspectors found that Iranian engineers were already using roughly 1,300 centrifuges and were producing fuel suitable for nuclear reactors, according to diplomats and nuclear experts here.

However, scrolling down the article, we see that the IAEA qualifies their finding:

It is unclear whether Iran can sustain its recent progress. Major setbacks are common in uranium enrichment, and experts say it is entirely possible that miscalculation, equipment failures or sabotage — something the United States is believed to have attempted in the past — could prevent the Iranian government from reaching its goal of producing fuel on what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran boasts is “an industrial scale.”

The material produced so far would have to undergo further enrichment before it could be transformed into bomb-grade material. To accomplish that, Iran would likely first have to evict the I.A.E.A. inspectors, as North Korea did four years ago.

Even then, it is unclear whether the Iranians have the technology to produce a weapon small enough to fit atop their missiles, a significant engineering challenge.

The fact that we are then far away from the point at which Iran can successfully enrich enough uranium for a warhead is pushed to the side and obscured, and the information which can be twisted into a campaign of fear and warmongering but right at the top.

But despite this, not everyone within the Administration is on board for this new marketing campaign, as made most clear by Admiral William Fallon, the new chief of CENTCOM, who not only denied the release of a third carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, but also said this:

Fallon's refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch".

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, "You know what choices I have. I'm a professional." Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box."

Yet while one side is trying to put the crazies back into the box, the other side is inviting the crazies over for meetings, and looking to them to incite grassroots support for an attack on Iran:

President George W. Bush met privately with Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman James Dobson and approximately a dozen Christian right leaders last week to rally support for his policies on Iraq, Iran and the so-called "war on terror."

“I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement," Dobson disclosed on his radio program Monday. “And the topic of the discussion that day was Iraq, Iran and international terrorism. And we were together for 90 minutes and it was very enlightening and in some ways disturbing too." [...]

Dobson went on to enumerate a series of meetings convened by Christian right leaders in Washington to discuss the supposedly existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran.

“I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington," he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.

"If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred," he added, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.”

Since the Administration is getting such internal resistance to their saber-rattling on Iran, they're taking the case directly to the base through the conduit of the theocratic right. This also has a parallel to Iraq, as one of the last people Bush met with before the invasion was Pat Robertson.

So clearly, there's a lot of argument and arm-twisting back and forth. Into this breach step the Democrats. And they are gradually becoming more united on this issue, and more importantly appear to be taking it seriously.

House Democrats, who have been divided on whether the president needs authorization from Congress to attack Iran, suggested yesterday that they are more united on the controversial issue.

But with Iran measures possibly headed to the House floor as early as today, it is unclear if Democrats have the votes to pass legislation calling for the president to seek authorization from Congress for a preemptive strike on Iran [...]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised several members, including Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), and Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), that she would allow for an up-or-down vote on an Iran amendment, though it is unclear which amendment or amendments will be voted on.

In the 109th Congress, Iran amendments offered by DeFazio and Hinchey were easily defeated.

But a new amendment by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) could attract the most votes. His measure would prevent funds authorized in the bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from being obligated or expended to plan a contingency operation in Iran.

Andrews said in an interview that he has spoken to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) about his amendment to the pending defense authorization legislation.

The DeFazio Amendment is likely to come up for a vote today, and it's vital that you call your Representative and ask that they support it. It's going to come down to the wire to see if they can get this into the Defense Authorization Bill. With all of the turmoil surrounding where the White House is at on Iran, it's important that the Democrats are clear and direct: no funds for any activities regarding Iran without explicit authorization from the Congress.

I don't know if anyone can figure out where this will lead. What's clear is that there are still a significant number of those in power, including the Vice President and possibly the President, agitating for war with Iran. This is insanity, and those inside the Administration doing the yeoman work of trying to stop it need to be supported by the Democrats.

Principled Moderate

Rudy Giuliani, savior to moderate Broderists everywhere, has in the past few days:

• Restated his support for the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, a position supported by maybe 20% of the country, only the most hardcore theocrats (how's this going to play in the Libertarian West?)...

• Is being advised on Iraq by Jack Keane and John Bolton, one the co-author of the "surge" strategy, the other the most neoconny neocon of the entire bunch.

This guy is no moderate. He's an authoritarian narcissist with strong ties to the some magical thinkers who got us in the current foreign policy mess.