As a personal anecdote, gas prices raised 50+ cents here in WV in 8 hours yesterday. Leon at Red State says this is not an isolated event.
Changes In War Crime Trials
The government is changing some of the rules regarding to War Crimes trials:
Pentagon officials announced procedural changes Wednesday to the military commissions created by the Bush administration to try terrorism suspects on war crimes charges at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The officials said the changes would not only make the commissions more efficient but also respond to international criticism that the trials were unfair. Several critics, however, said the changes did not address some fundamental problems with the proceedings, which, given a favorable ruling in a case now before the Supreme Court, are likely to resume this fall.
Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, the Air Force officer who serves as legal adviser to the military command that runs the commissions, said the most important revision involved changing the roles of their members, doing away with a system in which all of them acted as both judge and jury.
Contrary to earlier rules, the presiding officer, a military lawyer, will now decide questions of law. The other members, who will no longer play a role in most such decisions, will decide questions of fact including guilt or innocence; the presiding officer will no longer have a vote in these matters.
Among other changes is one altering the wording of a rule that during the proceedings, defendants “may be present to the extent consistent with the need to protect classified information.” The new wording says defendants “shall be present to the extent consistent … .”
But the revisions do not address some of the features that have attracted the most criticism. Evidence that might have been obtained by coercion or even torture can still be admitted at the discretion of the presiding officer, who may also allow other evidence that would normally be excluded from civilian courts, including hearsay, if he believes it tends to prove a particular position.
I will look around for additional commentary and post what I find later.
The geography of New Orleans
Interesting piece on the realities of the New Orleans situation:
New Orleans is utterly dependent for its survival on engineered landscapes and the willful suspension of disbelief that technology has allowed its citizens to sustain. As most people know by now, much of New Orleans lies well below sea level and also beneath the Mississippi River, which flows high above the city it helped create. If you visit New Orleans you can’t actually see the river unless you’re willing to climb its steep banks, mini-mountains that jut above the Mississippi’s endlessly flat delta. From the relatively high ground of the French Quarter, you might catch a glimpse of a huge container ship, seemingly levitating above the roofline of most houses. New Orleans is, in other words, a shallow bowl surrounded by a ridge of levees, which are supposed to keep out water from the Mississippi and from Lake Pontchartrain at the city’s rear—and this week didn’t. When the levees fail, as they have many times before, a flood occupies the recessed terrain in the city’s center. Like the people trapped in the football stadium, water has no natural way to leave New Orleans. It must constantly be pumped over the lip of the bowl formed by the levees.
New Orleans’ dysfunctional relationship with its environment may make it the nation’s most improbable metropolis. It is flood prone. It is cursed with a fertile disease environment. It is located along a well-worn pathway that tropical storms travel from the Atlantic to the nation’s interior. From this perspective, New Orleans has earned all the scorn being heaped upon it—the city is a misguided urban project, a fool’s errand, a disaster waiting to happen.
It has become clear that a lot of people simply have never been to New Orleans, and have never stood in the city looking out at the massive bodies of water surrounding the city on many sides. When normally reasonable people like Kevin Drum can’t imagine thousands of dead, I can only attribute this to a complete inability to understand the geographic realities of New Orleans.
I Am Out of Touch
It is becoming increasingly clear that I am simply out of touch with the vast majority of the American public. I really am. I just guess I have different expectations for what government can and can’t do, and what government should do.
I am sitting here listening to a CNN reporter (Miles O’brien) sitting there arguing with Haley Barbour that the federal government didn’t do enough to prepare for the storm. Haley Barbour pointed out that Katrina was a category 1 hurricane when it hit Florida, Miles interrupted him, and stated that the Pentagon failed to pre-position enough amphibious vehicles, helicopters, etc. In short- the disaster is several days old, and apparently the relief efforts are a failure according to the prevailing opinions in the. Soledad O’Brien is harping at Michael Chertoff because cell phone lines are down. Seriously.
And I guess I just don’t get it. I look at what has been done, and what has happened, and I am shocked the death toll is not higher. The entire coastline from New Orleans to 150 miles+ eastward was wiped out. Wiped out. Storms knocked out power, flooded cities, knocked down trees, caused flooding dozens of miles inland. The entire city of New Orleans is under water. Large parts of the country simply no longer exist as they did a week ago, and to make this even more frustrating, the same people claiming not enough is being done are the ones who keep drilling home how big this disaster is.
The size and the scope of this thing are amazing- mind boggling. This is the largest natural disaster I have ever seen in the United States, and somehow, people just expect everything to be fixed. No acknowledgement of the difficulty and the chaos. No understanding that it just takes a while (no matter what is pre-positioned) to get to some places and get these types of operations up and running.
Christ- when it snows heavily here in WV, it sometimes takes 3-4 days to get the hollows plowed so people can get in and out and get food. People go days without power. From snow. Snow. Which is a touch more predictable than the a category 4-5 hurricane. In fact, I am going to go out on a limb and predict that West Virginia will get hit with snow numerous times from December-March. Just a hunch.
So again, I guess I am just out of touch with the rest of America. I look at the unprecedented response, and I think it is amazing we are able to mobilize so much so quickly over such a large area. I am a little upset about the lack of preparedness by the local and state officials regarding the evacuation and levee in New Orelans, but for the rest of the response, I guess it is just too early for me to declare everything is a failure.
And before a couple of you knuckleheads accuse me of being a ‘Bush apologist,’ this isn’t about Bush. Well, for me it isn’t, but it is for the NY Times, the dKos, and a lot of Democrats. Personally, I am never going to vote for Bush again and have expressed enough supreme dissatisfaction with his choice of priorities over the past few years that my days of defending him are over. I will suspend my judgement until the post-mortem is written months from now.
This is about me looking at what I think are just completely unrealistic expectations for responses to disasters of this magnitude. In fact, if disaster were being defined today, the definition would no longer be “An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe.” Apparently, a disaster would now be defined as ‘a slight inconvenience that can be immediately overcome with adequate planning and really convincing speeches by political figureheads.’
From where I sit, it looks like the same people who think you can lose weight without diet and exercise are now in charge of defining what a disaster is and what the response should be. So there you have it- I am out of touch with the rest of you guys and gals.
Stop the Madness
Well, post Hurricane, we see the wingnut battle lines have been drawn. The tragedy in New Orleans, depending on your political ‘beliefs,’ can alternately be blamed on Bush and the War in Iraq or the sodomites and the sinners.
On a side note, homosexuals everywhere celebrate for not being singled out for a fucking change.
Hurricane Aftermath
I just caught some more of the coverage, and it just keeps sounding like things are getting worse and worse. I don’t know if the situation in some areas is actually getting worse, or if desperation is starting to set in.
It is, however, starting to be clear that the City of New Orleans was not adequately prepared for this- barring that this is the worst case of the bad case scenarios, and there really is no way to deal with it. I tend to think it is more of a situation where little can be done.
I am a little shocked that there was not more of a plan in place to fix a possible breach of the levee. If this was the worst case scenario, surely the city had to have a plan to patch it should it give way. At any rate, it appears that if there was a plan, it failed, and we are left with headlines that read like something from the Onion:
“Huge sandbags planned for levee leaks”
Big sandbags is what we have come up with 36 hours after the levee has broken. I had thought they were going to fill shipping cars (cargo cannisters) and drop those, but I guess not. Big sandbags are what the city is pinning its hopes on.
The whole thing is just so depressing. And, in a sign of things to come, gas prices here jumped from $2.55 to $3.09 in the 8 hours I was at work.
I don’t think people realize that while the death toll may not surpass 9/11 (although having been to New Orleans several times, I fear it will), the impact economically is going to be much worse. The entire gulf economy was just wiped out, and a city of a half million is largley under water.
If This Is True
I am simply flabbergasted and speechless:
When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.
Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?
The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it’s obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults.
Acosta’s stated goal of prosecuting distributors of adult porn has angered federal and local law enforcement officials, as well as prosecutors in his own office. They say there are far more important issues in a high-crime area like South Florida, which is an international hub at risk for terrorism, money laundering and other dangerous activities.
His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections.
You can’t make this shit up. What sane person would?