Coming Home

The DOD recently decided to continue not awarding the Purple Heart to solders with post traumatic stress disorder. The blogosphere has been set aflame with the debate over the issue with one side arguing that this would make a substantial step toward acknowledgment, reducing stigma, and treatment of the disease within the military, and the other side trying hard to find new ways to say that PTSD doesn't exist while not overtly saying that.

This was followed the next day with the revelation that military suicides have reached a new record and have surpassed the rate of suicide in the general population. The close timing gave me pause to think about the significance of the two stories in relation to each other. I am not saying that awarding a medal for having PTSD would reduce suicide among military veterans. I just think that there needs to be a better way of serving those who have done their service to protect us. Having veterans among my family, friends, and co-workers, I have found that many of the combat vets are too proud too seek help even when they need it. You would think that psychologists could find a way to communicate directly with a soldier's experience and explain that getting treatment doesn't detract from their valor or self reliance. But I am not a soldier and I don't have any answers. I just don't like the toll that the psychological wounds of war are taking.

Extinction Delayed

Some good news on the primate conservation front. Scientists have discovered a previously unrecorded group of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. This is a bit like the previous story where scientists were able to access a previously inaccessible part of jungle and discovered more Gorillas than previously estimated. It's not like these things weren't there before, we just didn't know about them. Still it means that from our perspective the species is slightly better off even if it is still tetering on the brink of extinction. I guess thats good news.

When Intelligence isn't Spin, Spinsters React

Since the publication on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran and its nuclear weapon, the Bush administration, by many accounts, seems to be in full strategic retreat. However, as Dan Froomkin from washingtonpost.com reported, W has already started covering his own liability. Since he has had a few more months than the rest of the country to prepare for the release of the NIE, you can be sure that he has already appropriately adjusted his warmongering. Here is a look at how the NIE was produced.

Surprisingly, the news media is still listening to Norman Podhoretz and John Bolton about anything, and specifically in this case, intelligence. Here is a report that relies upon their opinions, yet doesn't point out the problem with citing them as experts. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, made a career of out of being a neoconservative pundit before the heyday of neoconservatism. One of his earliest and best-known works is a racist diatribe about how he hated black people. But, more relevant to the current discussion is his complete lack of experience in the intelligence community. While he may be retired now, he was an original signatory of the "Project for the New American Century," the ideological framework for W's administration and foreign policy, meaning that he is deeply invested in making sure that history has a favorable impression of the administration. John Bolton, for his part, is also intensely involved in the Project. He has made a career for being a diplomat or wandering mouth for conservative presidents. Bolton also has no experience in working in the intelligence community, but does have something of a reputation for cooking intelligence for political purposes. Since the intelligence community is notionally no longer under the thumb of the neoconservatives that make up the decision-making in the W administration, these two old warriors are now resorting to ad hominem attacks on what appears to be dissident voices within the federal bureaucracy. "But I (Norman Podhoretz) entertain an even darker suspicion. It is the intelligence community, which has for so many years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W Bush, is doing it again." Behold, the evolution of spin, now those who pushed the intelligence community to supply, what can most graciously be called, misleading intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, accuse those who are career intelligence officials of politicizing their work.

The Pentagon, for its part, has dispatched the uniformed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, to Israel to speak with their Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, and their intelligence analysts. During the whirlwind 24 hour visit, Adm. Mullen will probably explain the constitution and the fact that the President doesn't really need the support of the American people to expand the war to Iran, something that would be hard to understand for those who live in a free, demoratic society.

Reps. Peter Hoekstra (MI 2nd) and Jane Harman (CA 36th) published an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal questioning the quality of the intelligence organization that they were notionally in charge of overseeing as Ranking Members and Chairpersons of the House Intelligence Committee. Defending the mischaracterizations of intelligence on the part of the W administration, "..., intelligence is in many ways an art, not an exact science." In summation, the entire piece reads like an apology for delivery the wrong intelligence, although they also go into a little ad homineming against the intelligence analysts who produced the report (the confidence remark).

Swept Under the Rug Monday: The Wyrm Eats Its Tail

Over the course of the Bush administration, there have been many famous cases of personnel management, such as the case of Valerie Plame. However, there has also been pretty severe staffing problems. Readers may remember, this Oct. 14th story in the New York Times about issues at the "Level I" level, but the problem goes much deeper than that. In the course of politicizing every political appointment in the federal bureaucracy, the Bush administration has pushed or otherwise drove highly qualified people from career positions in the various departments. From the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, to the State Department's Foreign Service Corps, from the Transportation Department's Transportation Security Officers (and the Homeland Security Department's Procurement staff), to Patent and Trademark Office's examination workforce, there is a common story of staffing problems. There is a recurrent question in recent times about whether the U.S. can survive the Bush administration, but I think the real question is whether the Bush administration can sustain itself in the one year, two months, and twenty two days that it can legally retain its authority.

In addition to driving down the unemployment rate in the greater Washington metropolitan area, this phenomenon has combined with another alarming trend in the Bush administration, that of over-classification (and more) and retroactive classification, a trend that supposedly found its origin in 9/11. Because of the volume of classified material and the resultant increase in demand for clearances, there is a backlog for security clearances that could force wait times to be most easily measured in months or years. If positions requiring security clearances are being filled by less than the best, it might explain why the Bush administration's approaches to sensitive intelligence work range from the illegal to the dysfunctional.

And the punch line is that the DHS can't properly comply with the Vacancies Reform Act.

The Numbers of Iraq

In the course of investigating this report about the most recent attempt to gauge the death toll in Iraq, I stumbled into a twisted web of public opinion companies. The organization responsible for the report, the ORB, is a member of the British Polling Council, which in turn is modeled on the National Council on Public Polls, an American organization. Thankfully, to help navigate this heady mix of numbers, acronyms, and propaganda, the NCPP on its homepage was nice enough to publish this list of 20 Questions That A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results. The most significant question on the list for determining whether the poll is strong or not is #11, dealing with the notion of margin of error. According to the pollsters at the ORB, the aforementioned report on Iraq had a very strange +2%. I say strange in that normally, this measurement would be a plus or minus type of operation, but thankfully for the people of Iraq or the propagandists who will publish these data for their own ends, the results are only positive.