Updated: 5:15 p.m. The House on Thursday passed a bill that would extend the Bush-era tax cuts only to the middle class, a mostly symbolic measure that nonetheless allows Democrats to draw a contrast with Republicans on the issue. The bill passed by a 234-to-188 vote, with 20 Democrats bucking their party to oppose the measure and three Republicans voting in favor. The proposal would extend the Bush-era tax cuts only to individuals earning $200,000 or less per year and families earning $250,000 or less. Democrats had pushed it to a vote this week in an effort to make the case that Republicans are holding an extension of the middle-class tax cuts hostage to an extension of cuts for higher earners. Republicans have slammed Democrats for the move, accusing them of undermining bipartisan negotiations this week on reaching a compromise on the tax cuts.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Judges on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
With just minutes to decide whether someone gets deported, overworked immigration judges have reached a breaking point.
November/December 2010 Issue
Joe Dierkes was burned out. Though only in his mid-50s, after 11 years as a federal immigration judge, he was ready to hang up his robes. His docket in a Minnesota immigration court was pushing 1,300 cases at any given time, and he sometimes conducted 50 hearings in a single day—one every eight minutes, on average—weighing the last-ditch petitions of immigrants who, caught by authorities after living and working in the US for years, had exhausted all other means of staying in the country. He was taking work home almost every night and weekend, but it wasn't just the workload that was wearing him down. Amid the hundreds of routine cases—illegal workers picked up during raids, legal immigrants whose residency had been revoked when they were convicted of a crime or felony—were complicated asylum petitions where the stakes could not have been higher. Applicants often told him that if they were deported, they would be raped, tortured, or killed. "You either believe the person or you don't," he says. In asylum cases, he'd hear testimony over the course of a single morning and issue a ruling by lunchtime, then do another few cases in the afternoon. Many of Dierkes' decisions resulted in immigrants being sent back to the countries they'd come from; he never found out what happened to them.
Making life-or-death decisions on a daily basis, Dierkes didn't want to be wrong—but he could never be sure he was right. Sometimes he'd realize after the fact that an inconsistency he'd spotted in an applicant's testimony wasn't one after all, or that he'd judged someone unfairly because she wasn't a very polished witness. "There are some cases where if you think about them for a while, you realize, 'Maybe my conclusions were not absolutely correct,'" he says. In 2008, after 11 years on the bench, he quit.
Among the country's 235 immigration judges, there is a consensus that the courts are drastically overloaded. A historic backlog is partly to blame, but so is the Obama administration's goal of deporting 400,000 people this year—about 1,700 cases per judge. The focus is on numbers, not the quality or fairness of the process, says Bruce Einhorn, a former L.A. immigration judge. Successive administrations have viewed the courts, which are part ofthe Department of Justice,* as a "widget factory," he says. "The only issue they consider is how many people are needed to produce as many widgets as possible."
Caught in the middle are the judges, for whom mind-numbing bureaucracy collides with thorny moral issues. Most of the time, they work without even basic staff (PDF) like bailiffs and stenographers. Increased immigration enforcement means that their workload is the highest it has ever been—three to four times larger than caseloads in other federal courts—but a combination of slow hiring and high turnover has left one in six judge positions vacant.
In a recent survey, immigration judges reported dramatically more stress (PDF) than other professionals: They were more burned out than doctors, international aid workers, even prison wardens. It was incredibly difficult, they said, to know which asylum claims were genuine: who had truly suffered horrors, and who had been coached by relatives or "travel agents" who promised immigrants a bulletproof story. As one judge put it (PDF), "It makes me feel ill to grant asylum to someone who I believe is probably lying, but it also makes me sick to think that I have denied protection to someone who really needs it."
Immigration judges are more burned out than doctors and prison wardens. It is incredibly difficult, they say, to know which asylum claims are genuine: who has truly suffered horrors, and who has been coached by "travel agents."
These aren't idle fears. In 2004, just two and a half weeks after a Denver immigration judge deported him, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was killed by the gang members he had left the country to escape. In February, a similar fate befell a former gang member deported to El Salvador.
The pressure can wear down even the most compassionate judges. In 1990, Jeffrey Chase was a young attorney who had made a name for himself as an outspoken advocate for asylum seekers. In a 1995 interview, he scolded judges who made up their minds before fully hearing cases out. "A judge," he said, "needs to start each case with a clean slate."
But soon after making that statement, Chase took a job as an immigration judge in New York City. And over the next several years, he changed. He started addressing petitioners with skepticism and accusing them of lying. He scoffed at an asylum applicant who said he'd fled persecution in China, suggesting that the smugglers who'd snuck the man into the country had fed him a sob story: "Only people who are coached by snakeheads talk like that." One of his courtroom speeches about lying asylum seekers took up 12 pages of transcript.
Attorney after attorney appealed Chase's rulings, arguing that their clients could not receive a fair hearing in his courtroom. Federal judges struck down several of his decisions; his conduct in one case prompted the circuit judges to describe him as "argumentative, sarcastic, impolite, and overly hostile." In early 2007, Chase was removed from the bench.
Now an attorney adviser to the Board of Immigration Appeals, Chase declined to be interviewed for this article, citing Justice Department rules. A former trial attorney who appeared in Chase's courtroom says that asylum fraud was rampant in the cases Chase handled. "I think he genuinely cared and wanted to do the right thing," she says. "But he just struggled too much with listening to these cases over and over and over again."
In February, the American Bar Association released a lengthy report (PDF) warning that the system was "failing to meet our national expectations of fairness and effectiveness" and recommended numerous reforms, including hiring 50 percent more judges. A spokesperson from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the federal department that oversees the immigration courts, said it expects to hire nearly 50 by the end of the year. But Denise Slavin, vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, says even more are needed, since the backlog of cases continues to grow. As a result, she says, many judges are now considering early retirement—which only leads to more vacancies.
Dierkes believes that nothing will change in the courts until the immigration system itself is overhauled. "This is a question for the public," he says. "Where do we want to devote our resources?" For now, the Obama administration's focus remains (PDF) on hitting its deportation goal, with few additional resources for the courts. The results, says Dana Marks, the head of the National Association of Immigration Judges, can be tragic. "These are the equivalent of death-penalty cases," she says, "and we are conducting [them] in a traffic court setting."
* Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously said that immigration courts are part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Wikileaks: Can Karzai's Brother be Trusted?
| Mon Nov. 29, 2010 12:40 PM PST
A crucial front in the Afghanistan war is the Kandahar region in the southern part of the country. A crucial player in that area is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of President Hamid Karzai. He is the chief of the provincial council—which means he essentially runs the place—and he's long fought off charges that he's a drug-dealing warlord (even claiming the US Drug Enforcement Agency has cleared him of this accusation, though it hasn't).
Now, the latest WikiLeaks dump of classified US State Department cables shows that AWK—as he's called—is in low repute among Americans officials, who nevertheless figure they have no choice but to work with him. In a October 3, 2009, cable to Foggy Bottom reporting on a meeting Frank Ruggiero, the embassy's senior civilian representative for southern Afghanistan, held with AWK, the US embassy in Kabul wrote, "While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker."
During that meeting, AWK shared suggestions that would seem to benefit, well, AWK. According to the cable—classified "confidential"— he "cautioned against the use of small scale projects and additional cash-for-work-programs." He wanted big infrastructure projects, which would result in lots of cash being passed around and which would be controlled supposedly by local elders. He also proposed, the cable said, that all the local militia commanders providing security to convoys and projects in the area be brought "under one umbrella in Kandahar, with one person given the license for the private security sector." The cable noted, "AWK is understood to have a stake in private security contracting, and has aggressively lobbied the Canadians to have his security services retained for the Dahla Dam refurbishment. Both he and the governor have tried to exert control over how contracts are awarded in the province."
The cable summed up the face-to-face by implying AWK was corrupt:
The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt. Given AWK's reputation for shady dealings, his recommendations for large, costly infrastructure projects should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The cable did not suggest what ought to be done with or about AWK.
Months later, on February 23, 2010, Ruggiero again met with AWK, according to anothercable, and AWK, unprompted, raised the allegations of his participation in narcotics trafficking. He offered to take a lie-detector exam and, the cable said, "dismissed the narcotics allegations as part of a campaign to discredit him, particularly by the media, saying the allegations are "like a spice added to a dish to make it more enticing to eat.'" The cable did not record any response Ruggiero made to AWK about this. But the cable—classified "secret—ended up with not a positive assessment of the president's brother:
AWK was eager to engage and rarely stopped talking in the two hour meeting. While he presented himself as a partner to the United States and is eager to be seen as helping the coalition, he also demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs. He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities, and that the coalition views many of his activities as malign, particularly relating to his influence over the police. We will need to monitor his activity closely.
WikiLeaks' initial release is rather selective. These are the only two cables in its first batch that come from the US embassy in Kabul. (WikiLeaks will be releasing 251,287 documents in stages over the next few months) Consequently, the documents offer snapshots—not a full picture—of the US government's interactions with and worries about AWK, who still plays a pivotal role in a pivotal area. But these two cables do explicitly illustrate one of the profound challenges of the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy: how to succeed in a war when you don't trust your partners.
Pakistan Shuts the Door on Transparency
| Mon Nov. 29, 2010 10:02 AM PST
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Interior Minister Rehman Malik would like global anti-graft watchdog Transparency International to leave their broken government alone. Or else.
On Sunday, Asian News International quoted Malik in a story accusing TI Pakistan, Transparency International's local affiliate, of acting like a "detective agency." Malik also made a not-so-veiled threat to kick the group out of the country. This comes just weeks after TI released its 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index. Pakistan's score of 2.3 out of 10 didn't exactly endear the group to Zardari and co.; it's barely better than Libya's (2.2), and only a slightly higher than the Democratic Republic of Congo's (2), and places Pakistan as the 34th most corrupt country out of the 178 surveyed.
Zardari and Malik's problems with TI stem from the five-year, $7.5 billion aid package the United States began delivering to Pakistan last year. At least half of that money, the Wall Street Journal reports, will be funneled directly through government ministries, rather than foreign aid groups and contractors. That's a heavy chunk of change to leave floating around the brackish bureaucratic backwaters of Pakistan. The US, justifiably skittish about the arrangement, signed an agreement with TI Pakistan in September that is intended to help ensure that the money gets where it's supposed to go.
But by early November, the transparency advocates were already running into problems. That month, TI Pakistan wrote to Zardari and US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter to complain about threats against the group's local chairman, Syed Adil Gilani, and his staff. TI Pakistan urged Zardari to guarantee the rule of law and freedom and safety to all TI staffers based in Pakistan. From the Journal:
Gilani . . . said he received death threats recently from "high-level" government officials urging him to stop his organization's anti-graft investigations, including plans for [a] graft hotline. He declined to name the source of the threats. "They don't want TI Pakistan to monitor" the US aid flows into the country, Mr. Gilani said in an interview.
For Pakistan, more "detectives" means more scrutiny. It's unclear whether Zardari knew that that $7.5 billion would come with such a sizable asterik. TI's next move: to circumvent the Zardari administration altogether. In a letter to Pakistani Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the group again expressed its concerns about the government's plans, arguing that it "should be protected from illegal or extrajudicial acts to fetter its anti-corruption work." In a press release on the matter, TI cites reports of government officials calling on all ministries, divisions, and departments to sever contact with TI Pakistan.
Packages like the one TI oversees are the sugar that make the bitter pill of war a little easier to swallow. Without such aid, it becomes harder for the Pakistani government to justify helping the US, and to sell its citizens on the idea that having thousands of Americans in the region serves a common interest. But without at the least the appearance of oversight, it becomes almostly politically impossible for the Obama administration to continue feeding the aid stream. Giving TI the job of keeping everything above board is the crucial variable in the Pakistan equation. Without it, the United States' uneasy alliance with the country could fall into jeopardy.
Sarah Palin's WikiLeaks Fail
— By David Corn
| Mon Nov. 29, 2010 7:45 AM PST
People who do not need more evidence of Sarah Palin's lack of seriousness should not read further.
As the WikiLeaks controversy continues, Palin could not resist the urge to tweet her thoughts about the affair. On Monday morning, she sent this message to her 317,000 Twitter followers:
Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book "America by Heart" from being leaked,but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act?
Inexplicable? Does she not understand the difference between apples and nuclear reactors? The two instances she links have little in common. In the case of her book, she managed to get a judge to order Gawker to take down a post showing portions of her bookafter the website had put them up. And the judge in this case was following precedent established when The Nation magazine was successfully sued by Harper & Row in the 1970s after publishing excerpts of former President Gerald Ford's memoirs before the book was released. The Supreme Court, deciding the case in favor of the publisher, said media outlets could not, under a claim of fair use, publish a significant portion of a copyrighted book (accepting the argument that this could weaken the commercial value of the book). Palin's lawyers took advantage of this ruling, in demanding that Gawker not show the actual pages of her book.
Stopping a media leak involving government information before the fact is not the same. The grand-daddy legal decision on this front comes out of the famous Pentagon Papers case, when the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not block newspapers from publishing the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to The New York Timesand other papers. The guiding principle here: the government does not have the right to impose prior restraint on the media.
This latest WikiLeaks episode could cause some, including Palin, to argue that in these post-9/11 days the prior restraint rule is a luxury that cannot be afforded. But that's where the law stands. With her tweet tying this important and historical issue to her own (less consequential) book, Palin demonstrates that for her simplistic analysis is the best analysis and that the best way to understand anything is to view that topic from Planet Sarah.
Obama's Deficit Commission Prepares to Carve Its Turkey
| Sun Nov. 28, 2010 10:49 AM PST
The dread report of the White House’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is due out this week. One of the Commission’s co-chairs, the putative Democrat and consummate wheeler-dealer Erskine Bowles, has been up on the Hill flogging their plan to reduce the debt by cutting the country’s already skimpy programs for the old, the sick, and the poor. His partner, motor-mouth Republican Alan Simpson, continues his ranting and ravings against the greedy geezers who want to sink his entitlement-cutting ship before it’s launched. Both of them have taken to boo-hooing because no one appreciates all the work they are doing to save the nation from certain fiscal doom, and nobody is willing to pitch in to meet this noble goal.
Personally, I’m still waiting to hear how Wall Street is going to pitch in and do its part--or the people with high six-figure incomes who claim they still aren’t rich enough to give up their tax cuts. Or, for that matter, Bowles and Simpson themselves, who retired on fat pensions and don’t have a financial care in the world. Since none of this is likely to happen any time soon, we’d better take a good hard look at what these sanctimonious old coots have come up with.
We already know a lot about what to expect from the Fiscal Commission Plan, since the co-chairs released their own preliminary proposals (as yet unapproved by the 18-member Commission) earlier this month. According to people with access to the Commission’s thinking, they seem to believe their best bet is to achieve consensus on a proposal to change the way Social Security’s annual cost of living increases (COLAs) are calculated. What seems like a mere accounting adjustment would, in reality, severely affect benefits over time. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare explains the impact of this scheme [1]:
Personally, I’m still waiting to hear how Wall Street is going to pitch in and do its part--or the people with high six-figure incomes who claim they still aren’t rich enough to give up their tax cuts. Or, for that matter, Bowles and Simpson themselves, who retired on fat pensions and don’t have a financial care in the world. Since none of this is likely to happen any time soon, we’d better take a good hard look at what these sanctimonious old coots have come up with.
We already know a lot about what to expect from the Fiscal Commission Plan, since the co-chairs released their own preliminary proposals (as yet unapproved by the 18-member Commission) earlier this month. According to people with access to the Commission’s thinking, they seem to believe their best bet is to achieve consensus on a proposal to change the way Social Security’s annual cost of living increases (COLAs) are calculated. What seems like a mere accounting adjustment would, in reality, severely affect benefits over time. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare explains the impact of this scheme [1]:
This proposal will affect current and future beneficiaries uniformly. The impact would occur after benefits are initiated, with each COLA, as the yearly increase in benefits would be slightly lower than would have been the case without the change. The impact would be greater with each successive COLA. For example, the Social Security benefits paid to someone collecting benefits for 10 years would be about 3 percent lower, on average, if the chained-CPI was used for the COLA instead of the current CPI-W. After 20 years this reduction would reach 6 percent and 9 percent after 30 years.This is is bad enough–especially since old people’s cost of living increases faster than the national average because of exploding health care costs. But of course, there’s more, in the form of a plan that would raise the retirement age to 67 and eventually 69. Working until you drop dead or are forced out of the labor market is utilitarian nineteenth-century thinking. But at that time, at least there was an expanding need for workers in a burgeoning industrial capitalist economy. The one profitable industry surviving in America today is so-called financial services, which consists of a small number of overpaid people passing money back and forth amongst themselves. They certainly don’t need any more workers, and if they do, they’ll get them in India. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said of the idea of raising the retirement age that it was not only “reprehensible,” but “also totally impractical. As they compete for jobs with 25-year-olds, many older workers will go unemployed and have virtually no income.”
There was no such ringing takedown of the plan, of course, from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose mealy-mouthed statement [2]tells us what we can expect from our Democratic Senate. “I thank the leaders of the bipartisan debt commission for their work,” Reid said. “While I don’t agree with every one of their recommendations, what they have provided is a starting point for this important discussion. I look forward to the full commission’s recommendations and to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to address this important issue.”
Nancy Pelosi had somewhat stronger words, calling the preliminary proposals “simply unacceptable”--but then, she’s nothing but the soon-to-be-ex-Speaker of the House. In fact, Commission co-chair Simpson has been predicting [3], with something close to glee, the “bloodbath” that’s likely to ensue next spring, when the new Republican House refuses to extend the debt limit and threatens to send the nation into default “unless we give ‘em a piece of meat, real meat, off of this package.”
When all is said and done, there’s pretty much no way this so-called debate will end up without most of us, old and young alike, getting screwed. An already stingy program that ought to be expanded to cover elders as their numbers grow instead is going to be reduced, and the only question is how and by how much. It makes no sense, but it may well have political traction because the pols can sell it as an attack on rich grannies--”the greediest generation” as Simpson calls the old--while the young are hoodwinked into thinking it’s good for them. And since its full effect will take years to be felt, the current crop of opportunistic politicians will be long gone into splendid retirement by the time these young people realize how wrong they are. Alan Simpson was frank about this fact in the Washington Post [4] on Friday, using another one of his nauseatingly folksy metaphors:
It takes six to eight years to pass a major piece of legislation. . . . On a piece of legislation that you know is going to go somewhere someday, you want to get a horse on the track. That might be not much. Then the next session you want to put a blanket on the horse. Nobody’s paying attention then. Then you put some silks on the horse. Then you clean the outfield and the infield. And then you put a jockey on the horse in the sixth year, and you can win it. Because the toughest part is to do the initial thing, and so it’s usually so watered down, it’s just gum, you could gum it. Then you begin to build it the next year, the next year and then you get it done. That’s what I see.And just in case you thought things couldn’t get any worse, consider this warning from Allan Sloan, Fortune’s senior editor, who wrote an op-ed in the the Washington Post [5] on Thanksgiving day:
[P]rivatizing Social Security, slaughtered when George W. Bush proposed it five years ago, seems about to rear its foul head again. You’d think that the stock market’s stomach-churning gyrations – two 50 percent-plus drops in just over a decade – would have shown conclusively the folly of retirees’ having to bet their eating money on the market. But you’d be wrong. Stocks have been rising the past 18 months, and you can bet that we’ll see a privatization push from newly elected congressmen and senators who made it a campaign issue [6].Arrayed against these grim prospects is a small group in Congress, led in the Senate by Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and in the House by Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. Says Shakowsky [7]:
Why is privatizing Social Security such a turkey? Because retirees shouldn’t have to depend on the market’s vagaries for survival money. More than half of married couples older than 65 and 72 percent of singles get more than half of their income from Social Security, according to the Social Security Administration. For 20 percent of 65-and-older couples and 41 percent of singles, Social Security is 90 percent or more of their income. That isn’t projected to change.
Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Addressing the Social Security issue as part of the deficit question is like attacking Iraq to retaliate for the 9/11 attacks – there is simply no relationship between the two and attempting to conflate them does a grave disservice to America’s seniors. Taking money from Social Security retirees whose average total income is $18,000 per year and average benefit is $14,000 ($12,000 for women) is simply wrong. It places them at fiscal risk and hurts the economy because they will be unable to purchase the goods they need. Americans in poll after poll have indicated their opposition to benefit cuts – particularly at a time when Wall Street bankers are making record bonuses.Schakwosky has her own plan, which will be an antidote to whatever the Fiscal Commission comes up with. But her ideas are unlikely to make any headway in the lame duck Congress or with the Democratic leadership, as they wait, already on bended knee, for the coming of the Republicans.
[8]The Deficit Commission's Plan: Starve the Poor to Stuff the Rich
We're Still at War:
Photo of the Day for November 29, 2010
Mon Nov. 29, 2010 2:30 AM PST
U.S. Airmen with the Air Force Honor Guard at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., perform during a Veterans Day parade in Las Vegas, Nev., Nov. 11, 2010. (U.S. Air Forcephoto by Tech. Sgt. Michael R. Holzworth/Released)WikiLeaks: Clinton Wanted Info on Iranian Graffiti
View high resolution “WASHINGTON ANALYSTS ARE HIGHLY INTERESTED IN CONFIRMING A REPORT REGARDING AN IRANIAN GOVERNMENT DECISION TO REMOVE ANTI-AMERICAN SLOGANS AND ART FROM TEHRAN’S BUILDINGS.” — Via Wikileaks, a diplomatic cable shows how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for help to (literally) read the writing on the wall in Iran.
| Sun Nov. 28, 2010 7:03 PM PST
Amid all the serious intrigues and statecraft revealed in "Cablegate," WikiLeaks' slow but steady data dump of 251,287 internal US State Department communications, there's 09STATE47326...a strange cable dated May 8, 2009, that seems to indicate Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn't read the writing on the wall—literally—in Iran.
"WASHINGTON ANALYSTS ARE HIGHLY INTERESTED IN CONFIRMING A REPORT REGARDING AN IRANIAN GOVERNMENT DECISION TO REMOVE ANTI-AMERICAN SLOGANS AND ART FROM TEHRAN'S BUILDINGS," the cable's author wrote (on Clinton's behalf) to Iran experts posted around the globe. "THESE CHANGES COULD REPRESENT AN IMPORTANT INDICATOR ON TEHRAN'S VIEWS TOWARDS ENGAGEMENT WITH THE US AND FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE EFFORT AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS INVOLVED IN THE DECISION, POSTS' TIME AND RESOURCES PERMITTING, WOULD BE VERY VALUABLE."
The cable then goes on to ask a series of critical questions about the alleged Iran graffiti program that Clinton wanted answered: "WHAT, IF ANY, ANTI-AMERICAN SLOGANS AND MURALS ARE CURRENTLY BEING REPLACED IN TEHRAN, INCLUDING THOSE IN AZADI SQUARE AND THE "DOWN WITH AMERICA" MURAL ON KARIM KHAN AVENUE? WHAT, IF ANY, PLANS ARE THERE TO REPLACE SUCH MURALS?...IF THERE ARE PLANS TO REPLACE THE MURALS, WHO AUTHORIZED THEM? WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR THE MURAL REPLACEMENT PLAN?"
Tehran's anti-US murals are the stuff of legends, from the former American embassy (now a Revolutionary Guard headquarters) to street scenes like the one pictured above. And if they were about to go away as a result of mass government action, that could be a useful bellwether. Too bad the State Department hadn't realized its alert was based on bad information.
If the secretary of state's request garnered any replies, they're not included in the latest WikiLeaks batch (so far, they've only released text from 220 of the cables they have). But had she read the original source of the reports on Iran's new-mural program, Clinton was bound to have been disappointed. The leaked cable cites a news report about muralist Mehdi Qadyanloo from Agence France Press (as well as one from a US outlet called "Iran Times," which recycled—some might say plagiarized—the AFP story). That AFP report makes it clear that Tehran's plan to replace some old anti-US murals was hardly inspired by a thaw in international relations:
"The plan is to make the crowded, traffic-congested, polluted capital of Iran lively with lasting and universally understood murals," said Mohammad Reza Sharif Kazemi, the man behind the municipality's beautification drive..."The nation is progressing and we have to give a new message for a new generation. We have to show the world the depth of Iranian culture."
And what was replacing the old imagery of satanic stars and stripes? Glad you asked:
One such mural by Qadyanloo is on the Shahid Sattari highway to Tehran's old Mehrabad airport...It shows the "Iranian war heroes and passengers killed when the airliner was shot down by US missiles in the Persian Gulf in 1988 over the Strait of Hormuz towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war," Qadyanloo said...One theme-based mural landscape in Vanak Square shows people walking towards a rich green field under a clear blue sky, contrasting with the reality of a polluted city of around 12 million Iranians.
Hardly an improvement in US-Iranian relations or reality-based governing.
In any case, only two months after Clinton's office distributed its cable, little doubt remained that Iran's government would retain its iron-fisted orientation toward Western and internal dissidents. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would "win" reelection, prompting a round of street protests and brutal government crackdowns. Beset by war-hungry hardliners on the right and pro-engagement peaceniks on the left, Clinton's and—President Obama's—Iran strategy has foundered ever since. But Mehdi Qadyanloo's probably got enough work in Tehran to last him for decades.
Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Oh, Him
Mon Nov. 29, 2010 11:41 AM PST
Seen on the #3 Downtown Express, 11/23/10.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)