Max's Politburo

Cringe with Televisa

It's embarrassing to think that I used to be a production coordinator for adverts like these at Televisa.  After the jump, Televisa's video response to the financial crisis (in Spanish):

More commentary here on Vivir Mexico.

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:

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.

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?

Why Zimbabwe is fu**ed...

... and The Times is not helping.

The MDC's withdrawal from the run-off election plays right into Mugabe's hands.  He never really wanted the run-off to take place anyway.  That's why he delayed it well beyond the 3 weeks required by the constitution, in order to give his thugs more time to intimidate the opposition and rig the poll in Zanu-PF's favour.  Now he doesn't even have to steal the election: he'll just run it and declare victory, or he won't run it and blame the MDC for giving up on 'Zimbabwean democracy'.  According to John Simpson who is -- miraculously -- still in Zimbabwe, most people there don't even know that the MDC has pulled out, such is the blanket news ban of the opposition.

Sure, there is international outrage and clamour and even South Africa is finally speaking up (though notably it's ANC leader Jacob Zuma, and not President Thabo Mbeki ).  But that will last a few days, a week at most.  Thabo Mbeki will be glad when the election tumult recedes and the situation returns to 'normal' -- 'normal' being the continued rapacious hollowing-out of Zimbabwe's economy, population and soul.  The tragedy rolls on....

So, Zimbabwe is f***ed anyway you look at it.  But if you read the headlines in The Times of London on any given day you would think that Gordon Brown is about to ride in on a white horse and lop off Mugabe's head.  Few organs of public opinion have given Mugabe as much ammunition as The 'colonialist' Times.  Here is a sample of front-page headlines from the past week, including today's:

• "Outrage Over Investment in Zimbabwe"
• "Call for Military Intervention in Zimbabwe"
• "War Crimes Warning to Mugabe"

The Times wears its heart in the right place, but it's ludicrous exaggerations play right into Mugabe's hands by strengthening his only remaining justification for power -- that he is single-handedly fending off Britain's aggression. 

Outrage?  The only people the Times could drum up to complain about Anglo-American's proposed £200m investment in a Zimbabwean mine are LibDem spokesman Ed Davey and Business and Regulatory Reform Select Committee chairman Peter Luff, plus some mildly condemnatory statements from has-beens like William Hague, Peter Hain and David Milliband.

Call for military intervention?  What a great pipe-dream, but the only meat to that article was a quote from LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown that "military intervention in Zimbabwe would be justified." True, but not exactly the sign of an imminent invasion (though Mugabe will certainly have spun it that way).

And if there was indeed an inkling of hope that Thabo Mbeki could negotiate an agreed departure for Mugabe, with a compromise government to follow, surely that idea was put paid by The Times (and Newsnight and others) calling for Mugabe's head in a War Crimes trial.  Giving dictators paid lifetime beach holidays under immunity from prosecution offends me deeply, but if it can stop the misery and save lives it should be considered.

The Times lives in a colonialist la-la land, and one Mugabe has exploited well.  Moral crusades are not the same as the journalistic search for truth.  In a blog post today, Times journalist Daniel Finkelstein rails against the BBC's John Simpson for reporting the facts from the ground: that Tsvangirai has been effectively outmaneouvred by Mugabe.  I share Finkenstein's dismay over the stolen election, but I can't help but feel that in political terms Simpson is summing up the truth, whether we like it or not.