German prosecutors seek greater U.S. cooperation in Motassadeq 9/11 case
As reported in the New York Times, Mounir El Motassadeq was released from jail yesterday:

The court ruled that Mr. Motassadeq had been denied a fair trial because of the refusal of the United States to allow testimony by a captured terrorist suspect. [Ramzi Binalshibh -- ed.]*

Motassadeq had been the only person convicted of a crime in connection with the 9/11 attacks. Judging by this MSNBC account, the Bush administration reaction was odd:

Adam Ereli, a spokesman for the State Department, said the United States was disappointed by the development. “We believe the evidence against him is strong, and we believe he is a dangerous guy,” Ereli told reporters in Washington.

Asked whether the United States had asked German authorities to take additional steps to monitor el Motassadeq, Ereli replied: “Not that I am aware of.”

I just hope Motassadeq's not on an FBI or CIA list -- we'll never find him again.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Neue Presse published this assessment of Motassadeq's release:

The responsibility for the failure is of course only partly the federal prosecutors -- the BGH [German supreme court -- ed.] made that clear in its Motassadeq verdict on March 4. If the USA had been a little more cooperative and made alleged ringleader Ramzi Binalshibh available as a witness for the Hamburg trial, there might have been enough for a conviction. Because the indications were definitely serious.

Nehm's last hope is for the Americans to relent: if they would at least agree to a transatlantic video testimony by Binalshibh, then the judges could develop their own picture of his credibility.

The German newsweekly SPIEGEL reports:

During the Abdelghani Mzoudi trial, Andreas Schulz, the attorney for victims' families, had already suggested a so-called "in camera" process for reading testimony or presenting other evidence. Only the immediate parties to the tria would have been present and would have had to swear to preserve the secrecy of the proceedings. At this point, however, the court was already too annoyed by constant "no"s from Washington, and did not even propose the method to U.S. officials.

SPIEGEL notes the ploy might not have gone uncontested by the defense, but it wouldn't have had to be uncontested to still be a good idea.

How about it, President Bush? Just like our justice system, the German justice system is constitutionally required to seek out any potential evidence that an accused person might be innocent -- but German judges are as likely as the next person to consider the source when hearing the testimony of a known terrorist. And even if Binalshibh is actually convincing in clearing Motassadeq, we're no worse off than we are now, whether he tells the truth or not. Let's find a creative, confidential way to get his testimony to the German justice system.



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* For more background on the Motassadeq case, see "Motassadeq verdict may be reversed." See also this list of posts about the related Mzoudi case. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:21:00 PM -- |    

 
FUBAR
Very, very, very bad. From Christine Hauser's report in the New York Times:

An official in the occupation authority said Wednesday that allied and Iraqi security forces had lost control of the key southern cities of Najaf and Kufa to the Shiite militia, conceding that months of effort to win over the population with civil projects and promises of jobs have failed with segments of the population.

"Six months of work is completely gone," the official said. "There is nothing to show for it."

Calling to Higher
From the widely circulated "Alamo" post in "A View From A Broad" (by "ginmar," a soldier in Iraq):

We kept calling to Higher for Air Support, for Evac, for reinforcements. They’d say, “Sure, they’re on their way…” Twenty minutes later, we’d find out--not be told---that in fact they weren’t. This happened about eight times. During the time they weren’t reinforcing us, the enemy mined the bridge that’s the sole way out of there with IEDs. Then Higher ordered us to Evac our way across that bridge. It was explained to them over and over that the bridge was mined. They’d listen, then issue the order again. [...]

Even at the end, the governor was still playing games. We worked it out with the Ukrainians to get out, and the governor refused to go. He wanted to negotiate or whatever. With people like this? I’m sorry, but Sadr just has that Jim Jones glint in his eye, except with well-armed followers. Furthermore, they’re a lot more hostile than Jones’ followers were, too. I kept thinking that we were going to have a Fallujah repeat on our hands, except perhaps they weren’t going to wait till we were dead. And I didn’t want my brother to go through that.
(via Seeing The Forest)

I've been crossing my fingers for months now, but I might as well uncross them. What an absolute incompetent mess the CPA and the Bushies have served up. ('Here's an idea: now that Iraqis back us, let's poke Sadr with a stick and see what happens.')

Mr. Kuhaida goes to Iraq
From a Bob Fowler's report in the Knoxville News Sentinel (registration required) on Jerry Kuhaida. Mr. Kuhaida comes from my home town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he was once mayor; he resigned his City Council position last September to join the respected North Carolina firm RTI in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Kuhaida said he quickly discovered that there had been no post-war plan by the United States for Iraq.

"There was no plan at all after the war," he said. "In spite of what (U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld said, there was absolutely no plan.

"The whole thing was running on a whim, basically. There wasn't even a bad plan out there. I am totally disturbed by my government and the lies that were told to me. I take them personally."

The lack of planning affected his work, Kuhaida said.

"There were very few major infrastructure projects that were ever completed. By the time you got something figured out, the U.S. government would change direction and emphasis on where the funding would go."

What few accomplishments there were, were "fluffed up," he said. "Somebody would have one success, and that would be used to indicate that this is what we were doing in Iraq.

"We kept getting pressure to make reports look as positive as possible." [...]

"From my perspective, the mindset of the CPA was, 'We're getting out of here. We're leaving.' That seemed to have a negative effect on everything that was done from then on."
(via Southknoxbubba)

Soldiers like "ginmar" will, I hope, give us some kind of second chance in Iraq. But that definitely should not be a second chance for this administration after November. Iraq alone is too important to be left to a bush league team. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:58:00 PM -- |    

 
So should every "screw them"
I had a look at Matt Stoller's writeup of the "Daily Kos incident" and its significance ("When Mainstream Political Kibitzing Comes Online"). I guess I disagree with Brett that there's much there.

As is abundantly well known, Mr. Zuniga (Daily Kos' real name) made a terrible statement about the deaths of the four "Blackwater" contractors -- mercenaries -- in Fallujah last week. Let's have a look:

Every death should be on the front page
Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly.
That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

He then wrote something that Mr. Stoller somehow manages to construe as a retraction, when it's clearly nothing of the kind: it's merely a clarification of why he felt he was right to be angry. With all due consideration to his Salvadoran childhood and service to the U.S., the fact remains that Mr. Zuniga felt compelled to say "screw them" about people who died like this:

Obayid said one American survived the first volley of gunfire but was pulled from his disabled vehicle by a gathering mob.

"He had gotten shot in his chest," Obayid said. "The people killed him by throwing bricks on him and jumping on him until they killed him. They cut off his arm and his leg and his head, and they were cheering and dancing."

Zuniga went beyond the pale and earned a richly deserved shitstorm for it. (As for the de-linking by the Kerry campaign and others: well, duh. A guy says "screw them" to charred corpses hanging from a bridge -- what's your "West Wing" call?)

Stoller basically argues, at interminable length -- but as patient readers here know, that's a good thing -- that "Most importantly, he has been writing thousands of words a day, chatting, living online, for years now, and this is the first remark of this nature anyone can find."

So what? Single data points have value: they can in and of themselves disprove important assumptions. Take the proposition, "Mr. Zuniga is reliably capable of respectful human feeling towards fellow Americans in their deaths, even if they had jobs he disapproves of." We can dispose of that now. Single statements can pull aside a curtain; sometimes it isn't pretty back there. That's not "character assassination," it's taking every word Mr. Zuniga says seriously, whether he likes it or not. With all respect, Mr. Stoller: that's all there is to it.

On mercenaries
I'm against the United States employing them -- and that's certainly what the four "Blackwater" victims were. Perhaps an unspoken reason for hiring them died with those four men in Fallujah: the notion that their deaths are necessarily less meaningful to (most) Americans than those of other Americans fighting in Iraq. If their deaths require -- as they do -- the kind of massive response we're seeing in Fallujah now, then bringing "Blackwater" personnel to Iraq was not as clever a risk- and cost-mitigating scheme as it may have appeared to some Pentagonian once upon a time.

If so, that would be one positive thing to emerge from the events last week. Assuming they're remembered by next week.


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UPDATE, 4/7: Brett replies to my criticism of the Stoller piece. He argues the exploitation of the Kos-troversy reveals political machinery ready to pounce on any opportunity to tar L(iberals) with the H(ateful?) brush. There's no doubt that's true. I don't think liberals should therefore crank up our own machinery to excuse or obfuscate the inexcusable. Stoller skates a little too close to that for my taste, whether his piece was intended as analysis or not. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:42:00 PM -- |    

 
Time shaving: a shameful pattern of corporate theft
The New York Times' Steve Greenhouse reports on a national pattern of theft by American businesses: altering employee time cards. One man he interviews, former Air Force MP Drew Pooters, encountered the practice at not one, not two, but three consecutive different major companies he worked for -- Toys 'R Us, Family Dollar, and Rentway.

Toys 'R Us (Contact Us):

Inside a cramped office, he said, his manager was sitting at a computer and altering workers' time records, secretly deleting hours to cut their paychecks and fatten his store's bottom line.

"I told him, `That's not exactly legal,' " said Mr. Pooters, who ran the store's electronics department. "Then he out-and-out threatened me not to talk about what I saw."

Family Dollar (Contact Us):

Top managers there ordered him not to let employees' total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut payroll: delete some employee hours electronically.

"I told her, `I'm not going to get involved in this,' " Mr. Pooters recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the hours herself.

Rentway (Contact Us):

They told us to sign the payroll printouts to confirm it was right," Mr. Pooters said, describing a confrontation last November. "When we protested about what happened with our lunch hours, the manager said, `If you don't sign, you're not going to get paid.' "

The lack of immediate paper receipts -- suddenly an ongoing theme at this blog -- rears its head again:

In the punch-card era, managers would have had to conspire with payroll clerks or accountants to manipulate records. But now it is far easier for individual managers to accomplish this secretly with computers, payroll experts say. [...]

Employees at Wal-Mart and other companies complain that they receive no paper time records, making it hard to challenge management when their paychecks are inexplicably low.

Greenhouse summarizes:

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

These companies and ones like them deserve a hailstorm of negative publicity, extremely punitive fines, and criminal prosecution and jail sentences for upper management. The dishonor roll in the story also includes Pep Boys (Contact Us), Taco Bell (Contact Us), and -- natch -- Wal-Mart (Contact Us), home of the "one-minute clockout." (I noted Wal-Martian thievery in a post earlier this year. As noted then, MSNBC reports that Wal-Mart may well become the biggest business donor to 2004 federal election campaigns when it's all over.) By contrast, McDonald's time system is praised.

This puts an entirely different spin on the much-heralded productivity gains of the 1990s, doesn't it? Anyone can make a bottom line look productive by stealing food from the mouths of their already-underpaid workers. It's an outrage [sentence toned way down - ed.] The corporate links above will speed you on your way to writing as blistering an e-mail as you like to the companies involved. Personally, I don't care that some of them have settled with their workers already.

The companies generally protest that they have 'strict guidelines' against this kind of thing. Well, obviously not strict enough. And if these companies put their middle managers under such intense pressure to cook the books, their own pious guidelines start to look like what they are: a veneer of corporate citizenship, designed solely to give them deniability when their managers are occasionally caught at the game they're forced to play. Heads should roll at the top when this happens, not just at the bottom.

Gary Farber has also written about this news item. He adds testimony by a friend in an "extremely well-known retail computer-and-gadgets chain" about similar practices there.

GIVE 'EM HELL CONTEST: $25 FOR BEST PROTEST MESSAGE ABOUT TIME-SHAVING
Contest rules:

1. Draft a message protesting time-shaving in your own words.
   
2. Submit it or them to the company or companies you wish to contact. (All those "Contact Us" links above -- that's what they're for!) The company should be either (a) one of the known time-shavers listed above, or (b) one you can substantiate also engages in time-shaving, preferably with links to news items, personal experience, or both.
   
3. Submit a copy of your best one as a comment here; please include:
   -- the words 'My entry', to distinguish it from any non-entry comments;
   -- to whom and when you sent it;
   -- a valid e-mail address I can use to contact you if you win.
   
4. This isn't usually a heavily read blog, so I'll see how things go. If there are less than four entries by this time next week, I'll wait until the fourth entry comes along and judge among them -- your odds are that good! I'll let some other bloggers know about this, maybe that will get some traffic. If so, the best entry by midnight next Sunday wins.
   
5. Family members may enter, but can not win.
   
6. I'm the sole judge. Preference will be given to messages that were actually sent (save any replies, auto- or otherwise), and are well-written, informative, and blistering without resorting to bad language.
   
7. If the winner has PayPal, I'll pay him or her $25 by Paypal. If not, I'll send a $25 check to the address he or she provides.
   
8. No whining, and remember: please, no wagering.

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UPDATE, 7/5/04: Mr. Pooters sent me an e-mail with the address and phone number of a lawyer's office, for any RentWay employees who might want to join him in legal action against RentWay, as well as an account of another time-shaving complaint against the company in Erie, PA. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:50:00 PM -- |    

 
Elizabeth Boo-hoomiller, ace reporter
Via the incomparable Daily Howler, this quote by New York Times "reporter" Elisabeth "Really quick, is God on America's side?" Bumiller in the Baltimore Sun:

Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times White House correspondent, on criticism that reporters were too easy on Bush on the eve of the Iraq war: 'I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.'

It's vewwy fwightening. This is somewhat old news (March 22) but still as pathetic as it was two weeks ago. I'd think at some point she'd realize she's in the wrong line of work, or her editors would realize it for her. But I guess I'd think wrong.

The Sun got this from the University of California Washington Center White House Communication Series, run by Martha Joynt Kumar; the Bumiller interview can be seen here (RealMedia). posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:05:00 PM -- |    

 
BBC is right about youth militia camps, say former Zimbabwean freedom fighters
The Zimbabwe Independent March 26 edition reports:

THE Zimbabwe Liberators Peace Initiative (ZLPI), a grouping of former freedom fighters, has thrown its weight behind the Panorama documentary screened by the BBC earlier this month on the country's youth militia camps. [...]

"We have interviewed and spoken to some of the youths who deserted these camps and what we have established is exactly what was highlighted in the BBC programme," [ZLPI president] Mnkandla said. [...]

He said Zanu PF has turned the National Youth Service into a military youth wing to terrorise opposition members and said the youths should stop using military uniforms while government should disband the youth camps.

In other news: as of this weekend, the image of Mugabe supplied by the government of Zimbabwe that I linked to ten days ago is offline. I'm not saying my little bandwidth guerrilla action had anything to do with it. Maybe it's unpaid bills or something; the whole Zimbabwean government site appears to be offline. Still: how about that. posted by Thomas Nephew at 3:29:00 PM -- |