26. september 2003

Colin Powell: Six months deadline for Iraqi constitution Secretary of State Colin Powell tells the NYT that the US will give the governing council six months to set up a constitution for Iraq, which again will determine Iraq's first election. Only when an elected government is in place will the colation give power to the Iraqis. In that time, the appointed council will have to work through the process of deciding what system Iraq should adopt, a presidential or a parliamentary style government, not to mention how it will balance the different ethnic and religious groups in the country. The deadline is being interpreted as a concession of sorts to France and other countries who has been pressing for "immediate" transfer of power to Iraqis, yet it is consistent with the US position that power will not be granted to the appointed council, only to an government which has the legitimacy of being elected by the Iraqi people. 4:55:43 PM    comment []  trackback []

Newspapers uneasy about the freedom of blogging Old media journalists are increasingly turning to blogging. A blog, by its very definition, does not have an editor who checks the content before it is posted to the public. Some newspapers may call it a blog just because it has a reverse chronological order format, but it isn't the real thing. The omitted middleman makes blogs immediate and fast, telling us what went through the blogger's head at that precise time. The downside, of course, is that we sometimes say something stupid, or wrong, or very controversial. A lone blogger can wear an asbestos suit for a few days to let it blow over, but media corporations are more vulnerable if a journalist/blogger enrages their key audience. They are also, of course, much more chickenshit, since they have a monetary downside to worry about. I suspect most bloggers had not even heard about the Sacramento Bee before its blogger Daniel Weintraub caused a local uproar by writing that if Cruz Bustamante's name had been Charles Bustmont, "he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher." So the Bee put a gag of sorts on blogger Weintraub. Hereafter he would have to send his blog entries through an ombudsman (of course "omblogsman" is neologism of the day) first. The result is that the entire blog community is now soundly flaming the Bee into a crisp. Mark Glaser of the OJR discusses the issues. 6:40:17 AM    comment []  trackback []

Conservatives against the death penalty Glenn Reynolds has a few interesting comments on the death penalty in a column where he discusses Scott Turow's book Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. Reynolds, and, as I understand it, Turow, represent the growing conservative opposition to the death penalty. While leftist opposition to capital punishment has often been based on the moral argument that the state should not have the right to kill (which runs into a paradox unless you are also an absolute pacifist), the new anti-capital punishment conservatives tend to focus on the growing evidence that the state is killing a small, but significant, number of innocents. Even the best court systems are faulty, and there is evidence that when the state prosecutes, it is not always honest with the evidence. That is a challenge, considering that the state hold most of the cards in a criminal court case: the prosecutors or the police have investigated, it has found the evidence, and it can dish them out as it sees fit. However applicable this unfortunate fact is to the capital punishment debate, it is also part of a wider issue. While life prisoners, unlike dead ones, can be brought out of jail if they are later found innocent, that doesn't always happen, and a wasted life in jail may not be that much better than a death sentence. As Reynolds says, One needn’t, however, be soft on criminals to pick up on another point that Turow himself doesn’t raise: If death penalty cases, subject to far more rigorous safeguards than ordinary criminal cases, still manage to convict the innocent, how many innocent people are convicted of crimes that don’t carry the death penalty? Far too many, I would imagine. Some of the safeguards proposed for death penalty cases — like requiring that all questioning of suspects by police be videotaped, or that all defendants have access to DNA evidence that might clear them — should be applied to criminal cases across the board. The fact that evidence suggests that countless innocents are in prisons even in liberal democracies should upset us all. If for nothing else, it could be us next. Since there is far less scrutiny awarded to the small crime investigation than that of serious crimes, and especially a capital crime, it is safe to assume that the smaller the crime, the more inncents have their lives ruined by a faulty criminal conviction. 4:06:32 AM    comment []  trackback []

Forces in Iraq This is a good page to bookmark to follow the deployment of US and other countries' forces on the ground in Iraq, and which units are placed where. There is also a map (right). The page will be continuously updated by GlobalSecurity.org. It is interesting to note that there has been a substantial reduction of ground forces in Iraq over the last month or so. The maximum US deployment was 148,000. CENTCOM reported on Sept 11 that the number at that time was 116,000. As of 20 August 2003 a total of 27 countries, in addition to the United States, had contributed a total of approximately 21,700 troops to ongoing stability operations in Iraq. In addition, four other countries have promised troops and fourteen are contemplating it. 1:34:56 AM    comment []  trackback []

French conspiracy nut Meyssan gets top coverage There is no end to the spin-offs of the "playing cards" of most-wanted Iraqi criminals the Pentagon issued after the combat phase of the Iraq war, and a few of them have of course showed the Bush administration itself in prominent roles. French conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan has issued his own set of cards, with Donald Rumsfeld as the ace of spades, and Bush only as the king of diamonds (picture). Perhaps most provocatively, Osama Bin Laden is depicted on the Joker, and asserted to be "a CIA agent charged...with provoking a clash between the 'Arab-Muslim' and 'Judaeo-Christian' worlds." Meyssan, the leader of the group Le Réseau Voltaire which sells these cards, is most famous for his best-selling conspiracy book L'Effroyable Imposture ("The Appalling Fraud"), which claimed that no airliner struck the Pentagon, but that it was a cruise missile fired by the Americans themselves. Reuters appalingly gives both credibility and advertising for this liar, without much of a hint or link indicating that his conspiracy theories are unfounded and absurd. Even worse, but not that unexpected, Norway's second-largest newspaper Dagbladet (quite far left) currently has this as its top story online, with prominent pictures of the cards and links to various sources (but no debunkings), but without offering any criticism of Meyssan's appaling conspiracy theories. Instead, the cards are presented as "the French answer" to the American cards. If the wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories have not been widely spread in Norway earlier, they surely will get a kick-start with this free advertising. So far, in the net poll on the same page, 55.2% of Norwegians who participated preferred the French deck to the American (18.5%). Such polls should always be taken with a grain of salt, but these results are as indicative as anything that even the crudest and most primitive form of anti-Americanism is strong and growing here. Here is a brief but solid debunking of the claims there was no plane hitting the Pentagon. You can find a good list of other pages debunking the absurd conspiracy theories here. 12:02:16 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.10.2003; 02:27:06.