Stu's Views

Back during Watergate, the question was repeatedly asked, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" I've reached the point on Iraq (and Afghanistan for that matter) that I would be happy to know the answer to the first of those questions. Let me explain.

When I worked in Washington, I was often frustrated by the media's simple portrayal of issues I worked on. I could readily describe numerous issues where the public was given an incomplete and hence uneven portrait of the factors crucial to making a decision on a public policy matter.

Now of course, I am largely reliant on the media for my information on current affairs(I do have a more informed background on process and politics but as for the facts, I have to get them from the New York Times). That is why it is so jarring to see such a difference between what Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld say, and the daily reports in the newspaper. For example we are regularly told by the Administration about the success in Afghanistan but today's headline reads, "Mood of Anxiety Engulfs Afghans as Violence Rises." The contrast on Iraq, as we all know, is even greater with Cheney talking about an insurgency in its last throes while the killings increase by the day.

This means there are three possibilities. First, the top officials are lying. Second, the top officials know something we and the media don't. Third the top officials, particularly the President know less than we do. I had until recently dismissed the last of these three possibilities regarding much of the "Bush is a puppet" rhetoric as overblown. However in watching and reading portions of Bush's speech the other night, one comes away with the impression that the seriousness of the challenge in Iraq and Afghanistan has not been brought home to him (yes I know he said it's "hard" but physics is hard, Iraq demands something besides staying the course and bemoaning the difficulty).

I still tend to doubt that the President is in the dark about the potential for failure in Iraq. I want to believe in possibility 2, drawing on my experience as an insider, that Bush et. al. know something we don't. But it's about time they tell us what they know that has them making no changes in their policies. If they don't, then we are forced to believe, either that they are lying or clueless, both scary possibilities with tragic consequences.

The NBA Draft is tomorrow night and besides providing the annual fun associated with seeing soon to be millionaires dressed in awful suits, we will get to see for the last time, 18 year olds drafted to play next season. The NBA and the player's union recently reached a collective bargaining agreement that creates a minimum playing age of 19 years old.

By and large, I am against the new age limit. There is no question that there have been some sad stories about high school kids who were not ready for the NBA who came out for the draft and had their careers ruined by sitting on the bench for several years. Leon Smith and Desagnia Diop come to mind.

However there are equally obvious success stories such as Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and most prominently Lebron James who went straight from high school to the NBA. Clearly each of them made the correct choice and did not need four years (or even one year) of college to optimize their basketball careers.

And of course many of those who do go straight from high school to the NBA are coming from poor backgrounds (Kobe is an exception). There is something paternalistic about the NBA telling these kids that, they may be sufficiently talented to play in the NBA but they will be denied the opportunity to earn the money that can lift their family from poverty. Furthermore, they have to go to college for a year, be exploited by the NCAA, and risk a career ending injury that will condemn their family to continued poverty.

In the end, the kids and their families should be allowed to make the decision to go pro. Some of them will make mistakes. But I'd rather have them make the mistakes than have the NBA make the decision for them. If the NBA and the NCAA are really concerned about these kids, they could provide counseling services to help them make their decisions and they could let kids who declare for the draft but do not get drafted (or get drafted lower than expected) to play college ball anyway. This would cost the NBA money and NCAA coaches certainty about their programs but it seems a small price to pay if as they always maintain, the NBA and NCAA care about the young players.

(As teenagers have recently won the LPGA and the French Open, one wonders where the outrage is about young tennis players and golfers?)

There has been much hubbub inside the Beltway (I'm not sure many outside the Beltway pay any attention to this kind of stuff) about Senator Durbin's remarks comparing the goings-on at Guantanamo to Nazi prisons. Durbin was roundly harangued by Republicans for putting our troops in danger and making an inappropriate analogy.

Don't get me wrong, Durbin's remarks were stupid. Invoking the Nazis is done way too often and trivializes the historical evil that was the Holocaust. However criticizing Guantanamo is entirely appropriate and what has gone on there by all accounts (other than Dick Cheney's delusional one) is a blight on our country.

More importantly criticizing Gitmo or Abu Ghraib does not put our troops in any more danger than commiting torture at those places did in the first place. Karl Rove this week took this canard to new heights at a meeting of the New York State Conservative Party. Rove said that Democrats just wanted to psychoanalyze the perpetrators of 9-11 and only Republicans could have mustered the response necessary to a terrorist attack. He further harangued Dems including Durbin as repeatedly putting our troops in danger.

I find Rove's remarks both reprehensible and dangerous (far more dangerous than Durbin's). Decrying all criticism of the Administration as weakening our military position smacks of nascent totalitarianism. If a free society is marked by anything, it is dissent, even in wartime. Such dissent in the long run strengthens our society and even our military by showing the rest of the world that democracy is a system that welcomes debate not one that represses it.

I think Rove's remarks mark a turn in strategy for the Republicans. Suffering in the polls on issues from Iraq to Social Security, the Administration is turning to the one area that is still has an approval rating over 50%, the war on terror. Rove and co. may finally be realizing that this was the issue, not "moral values" that won reelection for the President and now it has come time to go to that well once again. For both strategic and moral reasons, Democrats should hammer Rove for his remarks as strongly as the Republicans hammered Durbin.

I just finished reading Powerful Medicines by Jerry Avorn. As its subtitle states, it details the benefits, costs, and risks associated with prescription drug use in this country. Avorn is a doctor who seems to have been in the middle of many of the recent controversies regarding prescription drugs.

The book is very good. It presents a tremendous amount of information and the writing is crisp and clear. Avorn has a clear point of view but for the first two thirds of the book he does not let that interfere with presenting information in a balanced manner.

Eventually, Avorn succumbs to the temptation of writing a screed against pharmaceutical companies. The temptation is easy to understand given a number of the horrible stories that Avorn recounts. Nonetheless it is overly simplistic to wish that the United States was like other countries in its pricing of medications (the reason other countries can charge less is because we allow companies to charge what the distorted market will bear) and to assume that profit seeking companies should act out of the kindness of their hearts.

That said, I found myself agreeing with many of Avorn's policy prescriptions (no pun intended). His advocacy of an increased role for information technology in the prescription process is a no-brainer that has the support of such diverse luminaries as Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich. He also strongly advocates comparative drug analysis and post marketing safety analysis. Recent events have backed up his arguments although it is unclear where the money for these programs would come from. Avorn tends to minimize this last difficulty but does correctly note that it is in the financial interests of the insurance industry and now the Medicare program to get better information about drugs. These incentives need to be harnessed in order to make better drug testing a reality.

While Avorn tends to idealize doctors (who apparently always have their patient's interests at heart) this has little effect on his analysis. I recommend Powerful Medicines for anyone looking for a primer in this complicated policy arena.

I haven't blogged on the Iraq war lately which to some degree mirrors the attention given to the war by the mainstream media. Yet barely a day goes by when our death toll in Iraq does not increase. This week it passed 1,700 and the past month has been among the deadliest in a year.

Meanwhile the war which was at the center of last year's presidential campaign fades from the poltiical discourse in favor of Terri Schiavo, judicial confirmations, and social security. All of those issues are important but to varying degrees pale before the question of what to do with the 150,000 young men and women still stationed in and around the Fertile Crescent.

Recently there has been movement in Congress to call upon the President to set a timetable for the troops withdrawal. The Administration responds by correctly pointing out that doing so just gives the insurgents the knowledge that all they have to do is survive until that date and victory will be theirs.

Meanwhile Tom Friedman, struggling to justify his support of the war, calls for a doubling of our troop size in Iraq as necessary to quell the insurgency and establish Iraqi democracy. This ignores the simple fact that the only way to double our troop size is to institute a draft since our current military is not big enough to increase troop strength in Iraq much less double it.

Which leads us to the one word that we had hoped had been expurgated from the military lexicon, "quagmire." The Powell doctrine was ignored (despite the fact that its author was the Secretary of State) and we are paying the price. When you add in the fact that our sons and daughters are only there as the result of lies told by the Administration, Iraq is rapidly (if silently) becoming the greatest stain on the Presidency since Watergate.

p.s. Kevin Drum has an interesting piece on why the Democrats will eventually get blamed for the failure in Iraq.

p.p.s. After watching Hotel Rwanda last week my wife posed the question, "would more people be alive today if we had sent half the number of troops to the Sudan instead of the number we did to Iraq?"

This week, although not many people appear to be noticing, the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons are playing for the NBA championship. This is the matchup I predicted last October. Before the praise becomes too effusive, it is not hard to pick the NBA. You see, in the past 22 years only six teams have won the NBA championship. With all the talk about disparities in baseball hardly anyone mentions the NBA.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Baseball Research Journal (yes it really exists) comparing concentration of power in baseball to other sports. I found that while football was more egalitarian than baseball, the NBA and the NHL were about the same and for all the angst the Yankees dominance baseball was really no worse than it had been at any time in its history.

I thought it would be interesting (to me at least) to revisit this issue looking at the three major sports over the last five years (professional hockey appears to have ceased to exist). Over the past five years, five different have won the World Series. This is clearly the maximum number. Football and basketball have each had three teams win.

Winning it all however is, no matter what we'd like to believe not a terribly good indicator of concentration of power (it tends to be too dependent on random factors like Tony Clark hitting a ground rule double . . . but I digress). I also looked at the number of different franchises that have been in the top two, four and eight in each of the three major sports over the past five years.

In baseball eight teams have reached the World Series in the past five years, the same number that have reached the Super Bowl. Only five have reached the NBA championship. For the semifinal round in each sport, all three are coincidentally at 13. For the quarterfinal rounds, 17 teams in baseball and basketball have made it there and 20 teams in football.

What does this tell us? It tells me that the sports have been remarkably similar over the past five years with basketball being the least competitive and football being slightly more competitive than baseball. A majority of teams in all three sports have made it to the final 8 over the past five years giving their fans something to cheer about and children who root for these teams something to remember for a lifetime. It also tells us that much of the rhetoric about balance of power issues in baseball is just that rhetoric. When the Twins win the World Series this year, this will become even more clear.

My wife is a criminal defense attorney and a couple of recent incidents affecting her clients have given me more insight into Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

In the first incident, one of her clients was badly beaten by guards. The guards openly joke about the incident on an internet chat room, claim that the prisoner injured himself, and openly harass the attorney who is representing the prisoner in his claim of abuse (not my wife). This is the type of thing one sees on the tv show Oz and thinks couldn't be that bad in real life.

In the second incident, my wife's client had a heart attack. He was moved to a hospital unbeknownst to my wife or to his family. He was allowed a brief phone call from the hospital to his wife saying, "I had a heart attack, I'm in the hospital, I can't tell you where." We can all barely imagine what it would be like to get such a call from a loved one. Apparently prison procedure is that no one is allowed to know when a prisoner is moved to a hospital because they might try and break him out or get back at him. This despite the fact that we are talking about someone who just had a heart attack. The prison told my wife, his attorney, "Don't worry, we'd tell you if he was dead."

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford researcher had done a famous study on the nature of imprisonment and how abuse by captors of captives is a normal state of affairs. Certainly the first case above is an instance of that. The second one captures some of that coupled with a bureaucratic mentality that rules must be followed regardless of how nonsensical they become in individual circumstances. Prisoners have to deal with both of these phenomena.

With this in mind, the abuse at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, where the above phenomena were probably coupled with anti-Arab fervor and the culture inherent in warlike circumstances, should not surprise us. What should surprise is us the fact that rather than trying to closely monitor a situation where abuse was not just possible but probable, the Administration tacitly encouraged it. Calling the Geneva Convention quaint and tacitly supporting torture by rendering suspects to countries that practice torture lets loose the worst instinct of prison guards and soldiers rather than restrains them. While abuse may have been inevitable, its scope and its likely disastrous effects fall squarely at the foot of an Administration that did everything possible to exacerbate it.

A recent article by a former colleague of mine in this month's Scientific American which was geared particularly toward regulatory policy spurred some thoughts about the Bush Administration's strategy in a more broad array of policy areas.

The article discusses how industry has taken advantage of every instance of uncertainty regarding harms their products may cause to argue against regulation of their products. Regulatory science (and science in general) rarely produces results that are absolutely certain. Industry has learned to produce studies in journals that cast doubt on even voluminous literatures ascribing harms to the chemicals or pharmaceuticals they produce.

Once these studies are complete, industry can then go to the government and argue that their products should not be banned or even regulated. The Bush Administration has been very open to these arguments and through actions such as their implementation of the Information Quality Act and their peer review guidelines (both discussed here previously) have even facilitated it. These doubts have been used to justify Bush anti-regulatory policy.

This is right in line with how the Bush Administration has treated doubt and uncertainty in other areas. One of their central reasons for pulling out of the Kyoto protocol was the "uncertainty" surrounding the science behind global warming. Never mind that there exists a widespread consensus on the likelihood of global warming and it is only a few industry funded studies that cast doubt on it. This doubt was used to justify their policy on global warming.

I even see a similarity to the Bush Administration's treatment of last week's Amnesty International report (discussed in the entry below). Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all jumped on the report's characterization of Guantanamo as a gulag. This effectively obscured the damning information in the rest of the report. The perceived inaccuracy of this one term was used to justify condemning the entire report. As long as the Bushies can effectively use shreds of doubt and uncertainty to mask much bigger issues, they will be able to get away with their policies.

Over the past week, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld have all disparaged a recent Amnesty International report on torture at Guantanamo Bay. The report, following on a discredited Newsweek article, numerous reports by Seymour Hersh, and reported work by the International Red Cross, describes the conditions at Guantanamo in no uncertain terms. According to the report, the United States has created a camp "in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process."

First some concessions. Of course some of the claims by detainees are lies. Of course they want to make the United States look bad. Also there is little doubt in my mind that some of the individuals at Guantanamo are very very bad people who indeed would like nothing more than to visit great harm upon our country.

But come on. After Abu Ghraib (where unlike Guantanamo, the guards were stupid enough to take picture of their abuse) and after the deaths of multiple detainees in Afghanistan, can anyone doubt that Guantanamo is any different. Add to the likely torture that has taken place there, the fact that the detainees have been held without charges and without access to U.S. courts despite the Supreme Court's ruling that this was impermissible and we have an episode in American history that will make the internment of Japanese Americans look like the act of an enlightened society.

Probability and human fallibity virtually ensure that some of those held at Guantanamo are innocent. Furthermore at Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, torture of those detained (many who are probably terrorists but some who may be innocent) has occurred. In Rumsfeld's denigration of Amnesty International he notes that there have been 370 criminal investigations of detainee abuse. His point is that 370 is not many when we are holding 68,000 detainees.

Let's make the unrealistic assumption that these 370 are the only cases where abuse has occurred (and furthermore that the other 67,630 detainees emerge from custory no further radicalized by their experience). And lets assume that the abuse of these 370 individuals causes only 10 friends or relatives to swear destruction upon the United States. Is it really less likely in the long run that we have reduced the risk from a terrorist attack?

And even if it has, what is the cost of becoming one of the countries that criticizes groups like Amnesty International rather than one of the countries that condemns abuses of human rights? What is the cost of giving our critics in the world the capability to credibly mention us in the same breath as Russia and Uzbekistan? This is another debt that the Bush Administration has created and we will be paying down for a long long time.