Max's Politburo

The beginning of the end of the Olympics?

You read it here first: these Olympic Games are going to be a mess. 

In 10 years we will look back and see them as the top-of-the-market for large international sporting events.  At $38bn and counting, the Beijing Olympics will cost 3 times what was spent in Athens.  And the Greeks are still paying for that shindig, with most of the longer-term economic benefits having failed to materialise.

With hindsight I suspect many Chinese regret having won the Olympics in the first place.  London beware...

The spotlight has shown us China at its best and at its worst, with plenty more grief to come.  A side effect of globalisation in this decade has been the globalisation of protest.  Any event with media attention is a target: WTO, Davos, Olympics, you name it.  Countries will start thinking twice about volunteering to attract so much cost, hassle and media spotlight.  I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of large, international events.

What's going to happen in the next few weeks?  Let's see. 

The Chinese have already arrested 82 "suspected terrorists" for plotting on the games (and executed 2).  OK, maybe.  They all happened to be in Xinjiang, which has a large Muslim population wary of central Han Chinese influence. 

Millions of visitors are streaming into China, and undoubtedly many are thinking up ways to trick the authorities with a little protest -- by wearing a pro-Tibet T-shirt, or perhaps laying a flower at Tienanmen.  The heavy hand of China's security services will be closely scrutinised as it deals with these small transgressions.

China is already swarming with Western journalists looking for a story that will embarrass the hosts.  There is no shortage of material: desolate parents seeking justice for children buried in their schools in the recent earthquake; millions of people jobless without pay as their factories were forced to shut down to clear the air ahead of the Games; the eerie quiet that has settled over Tibet; etc.

It's going to be interesting, that's for sure...

The other war on terror -- Somalia

Has anyone been keeping track of US offensive military activity outside the theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq?  I thought about it recently upon finding a news item -- buried deep inside one of the free tube papers -- of another, the fifth (!) US air strike on targets inside Somalia in the past 18 months.

Not so long ago, staging an attack on (or in) a foreign country required congressional approval.  In fact, not so long ago the US took the moral high ground and declared presidential assassination orders illegal.  It was a strong message to send to the world, drawing a line under the Vietnam war and assassination attemps on Castro.  It was a message that served to underpin America's position as a beacon of freedom and good intentions.  That sure does seem a long time ago now...

Who am I to doubt the veracity of US intelligence agencies tracking high-value terrorist targets around the world?  But even so, I wonder whether the ol' checks and balances shouldn't apply here too.  While not as duplicitous as the US bombing of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, these attacks get scant attention from the media.  I can't assess their true value in the war on terror, but it's clear that they have a disproportionately galvanising effect on Islamic opinion against America.  But maybe because Somalia is a failed state, it doesn't matter, or at least no one cares... 

I am no doubt a cynic, and it's possible that these targets will turn out to be worthwhile, but at the moment it doesn't seem like anyone is actually keeping track. 

So here's a quick tally to date:

May 1, 2008: precision-guided missiles fired from an offshore location hit the town of Dusamareb and destroyed the home of Aden Hashi Ayro, the military leader of Somali militia al-Shabab, which controls most of the country.  Various accounts put the death toll at between 10 and 30.  The US Central Command called him a "known al-Qaeda leader".  The BBC describes al-Shahab thus:

Considered a terrorist group by the US, al-Shabab began as the youth and military wing of the Somali Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which controlled much of southern and central Somalia in 2006.

When, at the end of that year, the UIC was driven from power by Ethiopian troops supporting the country's transitional government, al-Shabab melted away into remote and distant parts of the country.

It has since re-emerged as a radicalised group of young fighters, who have been conducting an insurgency against the government and its Ethiopian allies, and attacking African Union peacekeepers.

The US has said al-Shabab is part of the al-Qaeda network, although analysts say it is impossible to accurately establish those links. Al-Shabab's leaders insist it is a purely Somali movement.

March 3, 2008: two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a US Navy submarine hit a house in Dhoble (Dobley), southern Somalia, possibly killing six people, variously described as "known al-Qaeda terrorists" (Pentagon spokesman) and "Islamist politicians" (local district commander).  The owner of the house claims his daughter and 4 cows were killed.  Kenyan sources later said that the real target -- Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, wanted in connection with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- had left the scene shortly before the attack.

June 21, 2007: a US Navy ship fired missiles at "Islamist fighters and foreign jihadists" in the mountains of northern Puntland.  Somali sources claimed 6 people were killed, including one carrying a British passport and one an American passport, alongside a Swede and a Yemenite.

January 8, 2007: twice in a day, a US AC-130 gunship fired on cornered Islamists fleeing from Ethiopian and Somalian troops.  Apparently a small contingent of US Special Forces followed the bombings to investigate the outcome.

The Anointed One travels the world

It's been quite a week for Obama, as recorded by scribe Gerard Baker for The Times. Enjoy.

The incredible shrinking story

And just like that....

             

             

             

.... before you know it....

             

             

             

.... phhhht....

             

             

             

.... he's gone.

Mugabe has done it again, with a little help from his friends... Mbeki, China, Russia.  By the time you read this the press coverage of Zimbabwe will be back to virtually nothing, and the world will start its not-very-long process of forgetting.

Based on a quick tally of the newswires this morning, there were 38 mentions of Zimbabwe in the global English-language press yesterday versus 300 to 500 at the time of the recent election.  See below for a very non-scientific graph showing the rise and fall of moral outrage in today's world:

The Bashir indictment: what a terrible idea

Yesterday, amid much feel-good righteousness from Western op-ed commentators, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, accused Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

Dictators don't come much nastier than Bashir, and the accusations in the indictment are undoubtedly true.  And yet the ICC's move is an incredibly bad idea.  In fact it's reckless and may have lasting consequences for the authority of the court and other 'indepdendent' international institutions.

The ICC was created to seek justice for crimes against humanity, independently and without concern for politics.  But being apolitical does not mean taking no account of the political impact of its actions.  With this indictment, the ICC has politicized itself and -- in standing up for its independence -- may end up losing it.

There was an enlightening piece in Sunday's Observer (before the indictment was released) by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal on the likely ramifications of this move.  Worth a read, but my interpretation is here:

Bashir's is the first ICC indictment against a sitting head of state.  There are two ICC arrest warrants outstanding for members of his government.  The day after the announcement, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is quoted as asking Bashir to cooperate with the UN.  Who is he kidding?  From Bashir's perspective the international community is clearly out to get him. Whatever shred of cooperation he may have offered before will now evaporate.

What are the possible outcomes of an arrest warrant being issued for Bashir?  He turns himself in?  Not likely.  He is arrested?  Virtually impossible.  He snubs his nose, retrenches and defies everyone?  Certainly.  So, what will be the ramifications of the ICC indictment?  Pick your favourites from the list:

1. The ICC loses credibility because its most high profile indictment of the year is defied and ignored.
2. The ICC damages its neutrality because Muslim countries will (wrongly) interpret this indictment against a head of state as motivated by Western persecution.
3. The UN forces in Darfur, already under attack by the Janjaweed (7 soldiers killed on Tuesday), are further isolated and become totally ineffective.  All semblance of cooperation from the government ends.
4. Relief workers may be threatened and UN humanitarian flights, which depend on Sudan government clearance, become disrupted.
5. The fragile north-south peace agreement, which relies partly on the successful arbitration of The Hague's Permanent Court to define boundaries in the Abyei region, comes under pressure and risks breaking.
6. Other regional leaders make a mental note not to cooperate with the court and other international institutions.

What worked well for the ICC in the cases of Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic is that these guys were either being military expelled from power or were already ex-dictators on the run.  No one cares if an ex-dictator is hauled before the court and locked up.  But that possibility is in itself some deterrent for existing dictators, eg that there may be justice once you step down. 

But indicting a sitting head of state will always be perceived as a political act by half the world.  And it will never lead to an arrest, weakening the authority of the Court.  But now the cat is out of the bag... 

Whatever happened to.... The Detroit Four?

Remember the four Arab men arrested in Detroit on terrorism charges in June 2003?  You might recall the endless replay of their home video of Disneyland and Las Vegas, which purported to prove that they were casing 'strategic' targets for an attack. 

It seemed faintly ridiculous even at the time, but three of the men were in fact convicted for 'providing material support to terrorists', primarily because they had been unlucky enough to move into an apartment previously occupied by an al-Qaeda suspect.  The government alleged that Moroccan native Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi was the ring leader of a conspiracy to provide safe houses, weapons and target information for attacks in Jordan, Turkey and the US.  The full text of the indictment is here.

The prosecution was bolstered by an informant who had lived with the men and and seemed eager to testify that they were extremists plotting an attack on the US. This recent article on Salon.com reminded me of the original story.

Following the high-profile arrests, the Bush administration held the case up as an example of a successful prevention of a terrorist attack.  So whatever happened to them?

In 2004, with little media coverage, the convictions were thrown out by a judge, and the prosecuting attorneys were tried (but not convicted) for criminal misconduct for having withheld and possibly manipulated evidence.  The DoJ complaint against the prosecutor is detailed here.

The informant in the case turned out to be "a self-described scam artist".  Prosecutor Richard Convertino claimed in a later whistleblower filing that he was pressured by Attorney General John Ashcroft to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defence. 

The Justice Department, following an internal investigation, admitted widespread prosecutorial misconduct and had the case thrown out altogether in early 2004.  The terrorism charges were dropped.  USA Today covered the story inside here, and here is a summary of New York Times coverage.

But the story did not quite end there.  Elmardoudi has remained in custody since then.  In 2007, he pleaded guilty to social security fraud, and a few months ago he was sentenced to 5 years in prison (most of which already served).  In fact, the whole crew (including the informant) appear to have been part of a minor ring falsifying documents, including social security cards (for opening bank accounts) and credit cards.  According to the Iowa McClatchy-Tribune:

Elmardoudi came to the US in 1966 as a child and has been a lawful permanent resident since 2000, living in Chicago and Dearborn.  In 2000 he caught the attention of authorities looking into "shoulder surfing" -- copying phone access numbers while callers are dialing-- at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, court records show. He fled from a Minnesota halfway house in 2001 and met up with Moroccans Brahim Sidi and Youssef Hmimssa in Chicago.  They produced fake immigration documents and brought people to Waterloo, Iowa City and Dubuque to use the bogus paperwork to apply for Social Security numbers, records state. The numbers allowed their clients to obtain jobs.

Elmardoudi is now in the custody of the US Marshals Service, and may be deported.

One of the other men, Karim Koubriti, recently sued the prosecuting attorney for $9 million, claiming his life was destroyed by the false terrorism allegation and the 3 years he spent in jail.  In the meantime the government has been creative in finding other ways to keep him locked up.  He is currently negotiating a plea bargain related to a 2001 allegation that he falsely told an insurance company he was injured in a car crash.

The disgraced prosecutor, Richard Convertino, faces continuing legal troubles of his own.  Following his grand jury indictment and subsequent acquittal, he resigned from the Detroit attorney general's office in 2005.  He then filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department effectively claiming slander.  The DoJ fired back detailing Convertino's alleged misrepresentations going back to his college days.  A lot of the gory detail can be found in the Detroit News interview excerpted here.

Recently a judge ruled that Convertino is not immune from the civil lawsuit being filed against him by Koubriti, and that the government need not pay the costs of his defense. Ouch. The local press has been making hay over Convertino for some time: "Many colleagues saw Convertino as a case-hogging cowboy who was more than due for a comeuppance." 

This being Americaaa, Convertino's private practice seems none the worse for wear, sporting the front-page testimonial from (his?) university football coach: "Rick Convertino is 'A Warrior'".

Whatever happened to...? A new series

Something that really bugs me about our media-flooded age is that while we learn about everything as it happens, in near real-time, we quickly lose track of important stories once the initial hype dies down.  And the media are really bad at bringing those stories back when the far less exciting denouement comes months or years later. 

A terrorist attack is huge news, but what about the conviction (or non-conviction) of the arrested perpetrators?  A celebrity drug bust makes the front page, but does the police's indictment for entrapment six months later garner the same coverage?  ... You can see what I'm getting at.  We end up with a lot of half stories in our heads.

I will try to pick up the cold trail of some of these stories in a series of posts digging up what really happened with some of the major headliners of the past few years.  Jose Padilla, the Merrill Lynch bankers who advised Enron, the 7/7 bombers, Natascha Kampusch, and so on.  Whatever happened to them?

Let me know if you have ideas or requests for future posts in this series.

America's missing 6 million voters

Here is a feature of American democracy we don't here much about: in a country where -- in a good election year -- 120 million people vote for President, nearly 6 million people are not allowed to vote at all.  Who are they?

Convicted felons, that's who.  Over the past 30 years a series of election laws have been passed in the US to disenfranchise anyone convicted of a felony.  In some states, the voting ban only applies to convicts who are in prison or on parole, in others the ban is permanent.  Only two states -- Vermont and Maine -- allow state prisoners to vote.  Federal convicts are barred in any case by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

5.3 million people were not allowed to vote in the 2004 presidential election!  That's about 2% of all eligible voters and 4% of the voting turnout in that close contest.  It gets better: the highest rate of disenfranchisment occurred in Florida with 9% of the voting-age population, followed by 8% in Delaware, and 7% in Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia.  Imagine how that election might have turned out if only a handful of these voters had been allowed to cast ballots!

  It is no surprise that the figures get more disturbing if you look at the racial impact: 1.4 million black men, or 13% of all black men are disenfranchised, that is 7 times the national average.  The figures have been analysed in some detail here by The Sentencing Project, a reform advocacy group.

Is it fair to deprive criminals of the vote?  The argument in favour is that voting is a privilege and the criminal forfeits that privilege along with numerous other freedoms.  How do other countries do it?  In fact, virtually no other democracy withdraws the right to vote from ex-convicts.  In fact, most Western nations allow prisoners to vote (unless they have committed electoral crimes), and in some countries, eg Germany, prisoners are proactively encouraged to exercise their right to vote. 

One exception remains the UK, where a 135-year old law strips prisoners of their voting rights (but restores them post-parole).  In 2005, a European Court of Justice ruling required the UK to amend its laws.  The UK government launched a years-long public consultation which has stalled while the issue has been overshadowed by the debate on terrorist detention laws. 

Or perhaps the question should be a different one: what does disenfranchisement achieve?  Is it punishment?  A deterrent?  When was the last time you think someone thought twice about robbing a store because they might lose their right to vote if they got caught?

With the world's largest prison population (topping 7 million at the end of 2006), the US undeniably faces an incarceration crisis.  I think we can safely assume that overcrowding and prison conditions are at an all-time nadir.  But where would momentum for reform of the criminal justice or the prisons system come from?  The prisoners themselves don't vote, and the population at large tends to vote hard-on-crime, so no politician is incentivised to propose prison reform.  Ever.

OK, so no individual politician is going to tackle this, even out of self-interest.  What about the Party's interest?  How does the prison population break out in terms of voting preference?   According to a study reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 70-80% of these votes would go to the Democratic Party.  That's enought to permanently change the electoral landscape of the US.  So I guess we won't be seeing any Republican reform initiatives on this issue.

But it is a perfect topic to approach purely from a constitutional law perspective.  What would the Founding Fathers have made of this?  I can think of just the right guy to approach it in this way...

Betancourt rescued

Well, this is big news.  And oddly perfect timing too, just as Uribe is angling to change the constitution once again to enable him to run for a third term.  With approval ratings of 80% before Betancourt's release, this now seems almost a certainty.

Incredible and worrying how -- the past 10 years -- constitution-tampering seems to have become a worldwide political sport.

The interminable decline of network news

The three US networks continue to outdo themselves with efforts to turn every election-year comment made by a talking head into a slander, a "provocation" and an issue of "patriotism".   If you took their analysis of comments made by Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark and transposed it to the 1950s it would sound just like a McCarthy hearing:

With friends like these, who needs Fox News?