corruption - Tom on Diigo

17 Jul 08

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
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- "[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
- [T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
- That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes.
- Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.
- Now, think about this. Not only did the White House condone torture, in contravention of law, but it did not care to discover if the men it had rounded up and put into prison actually deserved to be there. A CIA analyst believed one-third of Gitmo detainees didn't deserve to be there, and the then-commander of the camp believed that number was probably 50 percent. And the Commander in Chief didn't care.
- The progression of apologists for the state is always more or less the same: to suggest that the government is doing something flatly illegal and immoral is disloyal, and then once it has been proved that the government has been doing something flatly illegal and immoral it is only soft-headed idealists who think that such things are unjustifiable. "We have to be pragmatic!" they tell us. This is where the logic of wanting to "get things done" takes you.
- Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.
- Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.
- To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.
- The thing that gets to me is that it's possible, even probable, to make mistakes in a time of war. But in this case, the White House didn't even want to know if it had made mistakes, and innocents were suffering. That's not tragic; that's malicious.
- Why has two years of Democratic control of Congress failed to stop it or reverse it?

The bear cometh. Where be the bullets? - Crunchy Con

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politics economics corruption risk

He puts his finger on something that bothers me about all this "too big to fail" business, and it's namely this: that if investors come to believe that the government won't let something fail, then there's no reason for that something to take risks responsibly. The whole thing ends up being a confidence game. The other morning I was listening to an interview on the (excellent) public radio program Marketplace with Jim Rogers, a Singapore-based US investor, who was ripping the federal quasi-bailout of Fannie and Freddie. Here's an excerpt from the Rogers interview:

25 Jun 08

Ethics Newsline » Commentary » Ethics and Earthquakes

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ethics business ethics politics corruption workplace morality china

Those who think ethics is merely an option — one of life’s electives, rather than an essential for survival — need to look closely at a photograph from last week’s news. It shows a pile of post-earthquake rubble in China’s Sichuan Province. Taken by a New York Times photographer, it captures all that is left of Xinjian Primary School, once a four-story building in the city of Dujiangyan. According to the accompanying story, several hundred children died in its May 12 collapse.
What makes the photograph remarkable, however, is not the rubble. It’s the two buildings flanking the pile. One is a kindergarten some 20 feet away. The other, a 10-story hotel, stands behind the site. Neither was seriously damaged. Nor was the Beijie Primary School, a five-minute walk away. Beijie, however, is for the children of the elite. Xinjian was for poorer children.
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- while violent events are natural, they only become disasters through human failure. These failures sometimes are charged to specific areas of study — engineering, architecture, hydrology, economics — or to related technological and logistical arenas, like transportation, emergency response, or building inspection services. But the real problem lies in the human application of ideas and practices within these areas. Hundreds more children could well be alive today if over time these applications had been managed rightly.
- So what went wrong? In a word, ethics.
- It’s probably safe to say that before a single floor collapsed at Xinjian or a single pillar buckled, there already had been an ethical collapse, a buckling of integrity. These moral failures are most visible in three ways:
- Negligence. In its tamest and subtlest form, moral failure begins with well-meaning managers and officials who are so beleaguered and overwhelmed that they neglect their obligations. When the tyranny of the immediate pushes the potentially devastating into the background, the polite phrase is deferred maintenance. In reality, what’s happening is the slow, impersonal, hardly visible assembly of a time bomb. The Xinjian Primary School apparently had a history of problems: Some years earlier one wing had been declared unsafe, torn down, and rebuilt. In hindsight, those in charge should have allocated more funds to reconstruction — and demanded results. If ethics is about fairness, neglecting Xinjian while building higher-quality schools nearby is profoundly unethical.
- Incompetence. If the negligent knew they were inviting disaster, they still might be vigilant. Incompetence, by contrast, is more dangerous, simply because those in charge usually know they lack the requisite knowledge and skill yet push forward anyway. Globally, a lot is known about designing safe schools in earthquake-prone areas and establishing standards for their construction. If laborers are hired despite not knowing how to implement those standards, that’s an irresponsible tolerance of incompetence — especially if the laborers are only there because they’re someone’s relative, neighbor, or loyal lackey. Find wholesale incompetence and you’ll also find the lack of another core ethical value, responsibility.
- Corruption. Neither negligence nor incompetence is necessarily unlawful, and each can be corrected by knowledge. Corruption, by contrast, is the worst kind of unethical behavior. It wallows in illegality, recognizes its own evil, and has no desire for correction. It can destroy even the most dutiful and competent organizations. Bribery, shakedowns, graft, and other pocket-lining ploys of the powerful — these unethical behaviors, according to the World Bank, cost the global economy more than $1 trillion annually. The parents in Dujiangyan had every reason to be suspicious that someone, somewhere, was paid off to build a substandard school — a towering dishonesty that no one could call ethical.

20 Jun 08

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog

Ms Pisani should know better than most, having spent the best part of ten years within "the industry". As such her analysis inevitably extends beyond the practicalities of HIV prevention to touch on matters of more universal significance, confirming, regrettably, the common prejudice that the corruption and incompetence of international aid agencies are a major impediment to solving the problems that are ostensibly their raison d'être.

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social entrepreneurship aid political_correctness corruption

She thinks that two great forces have distorted international attempts to control the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Asia: political correctness and religious fundamentalism. Political correctness has inhibited unequivocal official recognition that AIDS is spread by certain sexual practices and the injection of drugs, which means that efforts at prevention are often directed at people who are not at risk in the first place, while neglecting those who are. Religious fundamentalism has prevented or obstructed practical solutions, such as the distribution of condoms, in favour of utopian goals such as sexual abstinence.

04 May 08

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog

blog.beliefnet.com/...re-the-militaryjournalism.html - Preview

military politics propaganda corruption

You know all those retired generals and other military officers we've all seen on TV these past few years, explaining events in Iraq? Turns out that most of them were, or have been, more or less on the Pentagon's payroll. Few if any of these connections have been made public, but the New York Times sued to see 8,000 pages of records, and this is what they found. Excerpt:

12 Apr 08

BP and its bosses sued over alleged bribery of officials - Telegraph

The suit has been filed by Grynberg Production Corporation, a Denver-based oil company owned and run by chairman Jack Grynberg.

www.telegraph.co.uk/...main.jhtml - Preview

business ethics bribery ethics business:ethics corruption

The suit has been filed by Grynberg Production Corporation, a Denver-based oil company owned and run by chairman Jack Grynberg.
The core allegation is that the defendants, without Grynberg's knowledge, bribed officials in Kazakhstan to win oil rights from joint ventures in which Grynberg had an interest.
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- Mr Grynberg told The Daily Telegraph he was bringing the case because he did not want to be pursued by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on bribery charges.
  "Unless I assert that I was an unwilling participant in this, my neck could be on the line. I'm too old to go to prison," said 76-year-old Mr Grynberg, who believes the minimum federal sentence in such a situation would be five years and a $1m fine.
  This is the second such case filed by Mr Grynberg against BP in recent weeks. BP and Lord Browne were named in a suit alleging bribery of government officials in Grenada.

21 Mar 07

Betrayal of the USS Liberty

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adm-moore corruption israel lbj mcnamara politics ussliberty

The men of the USS Liberty represented the United States. They were
attacked for two hours, causing 70 percent of American casualties, and
the eventual loss of our best intelligence ship. These sailors and
Marines were entitled to our best defense. We gave them no defense.

Did our government put Israel's interests ahead of our own? If so,
why? Does our government continue to subordinate American interests to
Israeli interests? These are important questions that should be
investigated by an independent, fully empowered commission of the
American government.

The American people deserve to know the truth about this attack. We
must finally shed some light on one of the blackest pages in American
naval history. It is a duty we owe not only to the brave men of the USS
Liberty, but to every man and woman who is asked to wear the uniform of
the United States.

Admiral Moorer was joined in the independent
commission of inquiry by Gen. Ray Davis (recently deceased); Rear Adm.
Merlin Staring; former Judge Advocate General of the Navy and Ambassador
James Akins.

10 Mar 07

Has telling the truth become sackable? | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/...main.jhtml - Preview

anti-semitism blair corruption political_correctness politics uk-politics

I'd never joke about anti-Semitism, not least because my
Jewish friends tell me increasingly about the "civilised"
or "respectable" version of it that they find creeping
into everyday life - notably, it seems, in the BBC's coverage
of the Middle East, which appears to uphold the view that Israel is
evil and an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to take over
the world (Adolf Hitler, q.v.).
But can it be right that Lord Levy is being "hung out to
dry" in the cash-for-honours case because, as his rabbi has
said, he is Jewish? I very much doubt it. You might think there are
all sorts of reasons why Lord Levy deserves to be locked up and the
key thrown away that have nothing to do with his ethnicity - his
invention of Alvin Stardust being principal among them. The main
reason most of us know Lord Levy is Jewish is that he has made such
a big deal of telling everyone what a prominent member of the Jewish
community he is: he can't have it both ways.

16 Aug 06

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

www.mtholyoke.edu/...orwell46.htm - Preview

corruption language orwell politics

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. - thomasneal on 2006-08-16

06 Jul 06

Prescott's charity gift came from public purse - Britain - Times Online

www.timesonline.co.uk/...0,,17129-2253562,00.html - Preview

corruption politics prescott sleaze uk

Mr Anschutz, who has close links to President Bush, is the owner of AEG entertainment, which was handed the Dome free for 20 years in June 2004, although taxpayers are expected to receive a share of the estimated at £216 million over the course of the contract. - thomasneal on 2006-07-06

08 May 06

Tom 's Library tagged corruption → View Popular

Rule of law? Screw it, says US president - Crunchy Con

The bear cometh. Where be the bullets? - Crunchy Con

Ethics Newsline » Commentary » Ethics and Earthquakes

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog

Crunchy Con - Rod Dreher, Conservative blog, Beliefnet conservative politics and religion blog

BP and its bosses sued over alleged bribery of officials - Telegraph

Betrayal of the USS Liberty

Has telling the truth become sackable? | Dt Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Prescott's charity gift came from public purse - Britain - Times Online

A World Connected - How Western Aid Helped Destroy Somalia

Why Is Africa Still Poor?

Telegraph | Opinion | I'm beginning to live in fear of the state

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