Barack Obama is the clear choice of homeless people, at least those in the Venice and Santa Monica, CA, environs, for president. Despite polling that shows Hillary Clinton doing generally better among the backbone Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and the poor, to the extent those are distinct groups these days—almost no one in the parks and alleys and food lines supports her other than a few who think an Obama presidency would be aimed exclusively at advancing the lot of black Americans.

Hardly anyone agrees with the official BTC News position, which is that whichever Democrat wins the nomination and presumably the presidency will be so crippled by recession, interest on the national debt, the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan—where we will remain for the duration—and the inevitable burst of Democratic congressional corruption, when the party wins its near-bulletproof majority, that they’ll do little to improve the lot of displaced persons even should they have the inclination, which isn’t at all obvious.

Regardless the realities, though, Obama, assuming he gets the nomination, will collect virtually all the homeless votes here. That could amount to about three unless someone makes an effort to register the community and scrape them off the streets in time to get to the polls, but a demographic dominated is a demographic dominated.

In truth, the needs are so overwhelming that no traditional Democratic candidate would even dream of attempting to address them. The great majority of homeless people are in desperate need of psychiatric aid or substance abuse treatment or both, and those things are in desperately short supply.

Being homeless is mentally and physically exhausting; when you see homeless people laid out during the day, the chances are good that it’s because they spent the night getting chased out of doorways, parking lots and parks, and they’re attempting to catch up on their sleep. Since services for the crowd are only available during the day, many homeless people eventually give up on obtaining them because of the consuming need for sleep.

The most basic unmet need of the homeless is a home. Shelters are in short supply, and ones that can provide a bed continuously for the months or longer necessary to integrate people into rehabilitation programs of any stripe are even more rare, as is permanent, low-cost housing. Not to say that everyone is a good candidate for the services, but more often than not the ones who aren’t have simply been ground down to human shells lacking the capacity to strive. Most people can handle only so much indignity, discomfort, physical strain and mental stress before sinking into semi-consciousness. Lots of homeless people smell bad because after a while the relatively simple act of locating an accessible shower requires an unsustainable effort of will.

We’re talking tens of billions of dollars to eradicate homelessness. We need many more social workers and mental health professionals, along with traditional health care workers. We need many more short- and long-term shelters, and tens of thousands of permanent, low-cost housing units. In short, we need an all-out refugee assistance program like the one that should have been, but wasn’t, in place after Hurricane Katrina, and we need to sustain it for decades despite the inevitable sense of intractability that will at some point take hold.

Obama shows no signs of initiating or even endorsing that sort of effort even in the absence of the political and fiscal obstacles standing in the way but his rousing rhetoric still carries the day on the streets, just as it does in high-income “liberal” enclaves and an increasing number of congressional office suites. It’d be interesting to arrange a meet and greet between the candidate and those diverse constituencies.

The proprietor of BTC News at present numbers among the displaced; if you like the site and care to support it financially, this would be a fine time to do so.

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Slake’s Limbo, by Felice Holman
Mr Pye, by Mervyn Peake
The Gospel According to the Simpsons, by Mark I. Pinsky

This month takes us on three spiritual quests, ranging from an unsubtle thematic exploration on the rocks and under the tracks, to a sort of allegorical cocktail, to–screw it–non-fiction straight from the bottle. Slake’s Limbo, although it’s a young adult book, is heavy enough Christian and pagan symbolism that it could cultural studies goofballs all tipsy. Mr. Pye inflicts a rather overt Christian symbolism on its main character, and while I don’t think the thematic stuff added very much to Slake, how well Pye succeeds depends almost entirely on what it was the author was trying to do. It’s probably more compellling to talk about than it was to read. Like most things, I prefer my symbolic heavy-handedness when it’s used to make jokes. You can write entire books explaining them, and one Mark Pinsky has done just that. The best success of The Gospel According to the Simpsons is to remind me how good the jokes could be.

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Circumstances in Iraq are insanely complicated, but not generally indecipherable. The major players are known—some well, some not so well—many major occurrences are reported, and a fair number of people who are either in Iraq or know the country well regularly provide commentary and analysis. Yet the US press continue to rely largely on the US government for information—the one source that has proved consistently wrong about what is happening in the country and what those events mean since before the invasion and occupation began.

Not everyone is equally guilty: McClatchy Newspapers, formerly Knight Ridder, has had a sterling team in Iraq since the invasion, and their Washington Bureau correspondents were among the lone skeptical voices reporting on the Bush administration’s sales pitch for the invasion. But editors and reporters at the heavyweight newspapers, the Washington Post and New York Times, despite the credible efforts of a few of their writers, served as little more than government mouthpieces prior to the invasion and continue to get spun by the administration and US military sources in gravity-defying fashion.

On the military and quasi-military front, there are at least six sides in Iraq: the US military; the Medhi Army, a Shiite militia fielded by nationalist, anti-occupation cleric Moqtada al Sadr; the Badr Brigade of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a Shiite militia fielded by the Federalist al Hakim family—they’re the ones who lived in exile in Iran during Saddam’s reign and who were trained and financed by the Iranians, and ISCI is the primary ally of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki’s Da’wa party, which doesn’t have a militia— the Kurdish militia, some of whom have been integrated into the national army and some of whom remain separate, functioning as Iraqi Kurdistan’s national guard; the Sunni/Ba’athist insurgents, an umbrella moniker for several organizations which include former Hussein regime members, Sunni tribes and others disaffected from the government; and the radical religious Sunnis, including the organization known here as Al Qaeda in Iraq, under which most of the non-Iraqi Arab fighters serve.

Add to that mix the so-called Sunni Awakening forces, many of whom were recruited by the US from the ranks of the insurgents, whose primary allegiance is tribal, and who are regarded with deep suspicion by the central government. The Awakening forces total about 70,000 and are armed, trained and financed by the US. Recently they’ve been in the news because the US fell behind on their payroll obligations and a number of the Awakening units either went on strike or declared their intention to do so soon.

Politically, the major groups differ on whether Iraq should function as a unitary state or a federalist one. The Kurds and ISCI favor a federalist system, dividing the country into regions each with considerable internal autonomy. Not coincidentally, most of Iraq’s oil sits in provinces that are within the two groups’ spheres of influence.

The Sadrists and the insurgents favor a unitary state with a strong central government and little regional autonomy, partly for economic reasons (see “oil” above) and partly because they see the federalist scheme as the beginning of the end of Iraq as it has existed for most of the past century. The radical religious Sunnis, by far the smallest of the groups, want a unitary state with a fundamentalist religious government—the Islamic Caliphate that the Bush administration is fond of threatening us with.

So we have two groups, al Sadr’s and the insurgents, that are both vehemently anti-occupation and anti-federalist but have significant enough religious and political differences to make cooperation between them problematic. We have two other groups, the Kurds and ISCI, who favor federalism but have major differences of opinion about which of the northern provinces could legitimately be absorbed into the Kurdish federation.

All of those groups have generally good relations with the Iranian government. Of the majority Shi’ite groups, the ISCI and prime minister al Maliki’s Da’wa party have the strongest ties to the neighboring state. Moqtada al Sadr has a more cautious relationship; unlike the ISCI and Da’wa leaders, he and his family remained in Iraq throughout Saddam’s tenure despite the obvious peril: his father and uncle, both of whom were among the country’s top clerics, were murdered by Saddam. His constituency, drawn in large part from the most economically deprived Shiite enclaves, did much of the fighting and dying in the Iraq-Iran war, which ended less than 20 years ago and signalled the beginning of a decline that accelerated with the sanctions imposed following the first Gulf War, and want into overdrive after the US invasion in 2003.

One reason all this matters is that the US is constantly accusing Iran of arming the forces who are attacking Iraqi soldiers and police and US troops, while painting al Sadr as Iran’s man in Iraq when he enjoys considerably less favor there than many other Iraqi political figures, including one-time Washington fair-haired boy Ahmed Chalabi. Not too long ago, the Iranians help calm the waters in southern Iraq after the central government, perhaps prodded by the ISCI, sent army troops down to Basra and other important southern cities in order to dislodge al Sadr’s militia from its position of strength there in advance of provincial elections later this year. Petitioned by ISCI and Dawa parliamentarians, the head of Iran’s Qod Force—an influential paramilitary wing of the country’s cleric-controlled Revolutionary Guards—brokered a deal which culminated in al Sadr’s declaration of a unilateral cease fire after the initial Iraqi army incursion faltered and cast serious doubt on the continued existence of the central government.

Another reason it matters is that the complexity of the relationships between the various parties, while not indecipherable, nicely highlights the folly of attempting to occupy the country—especially with fewer than half the troops called for by Petraeus and his coauthors of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, which recommends a ratio of 20 trined peacekeeping and counterinsurgency troops for each 1,000 indigenous civilians. With Iraq’s population of 26 million, less however many we’ve killed or chased out of the country, the recommended troop level is 500,000, as opposed to the 130,000-180,000 we’ve had there during the past four years. And very of them are specifically trained as peacekeepers or counterinsurgency forces.

A third reason mastering the details matters is the one that prompted this restrained rant: that the failure to do so allows the administration virtually free reign to lie and distort without challenge, especially with the help of their trained seals among print and broadcast military analysts, a subject BTC News contributor and former White House writer Eric Brewer brought up during his most recent trip to the White House press room for Raw Story (who actually pays him to go, unlike, say, me).

And speaking of money, the editor of this fine publication remains an internally displaced person right here in the US. If you like the site and can afford to help support it, please feel perfectly free to make a contribution via the “Support BTC News” graphic atop the right-hand column.

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That’s a joke, the “adversarial” tag, but a story in the New York Times today helps explain the reason so many people see the press as anti-government. Investigative reporter David Barstow uncovered a White House-approved Pentagon operation to use high-profile television and print military analysts, mostly retired general officers, to help sell the Iraq invasion and, afterward, spin the occupation as a success. Along the way, the Pentagon deployed the generals to downplay the abuse of prisoners under US control at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, while the generals used their close relationship with the Pentagon to help boost their civilian careers as lobbyists, consultants and military contractors.

Barstow outlines how the Pentagon uses the analysts to counteract reporting from television and print news outlets that casts doubt on administration plans, operations and statements about Iraq and terrorism. The analysts receive talking points and sometimes visual aids from the Pentagon and then take their message to the networks and newspapers.

In effect, the news outlets are paying Pentagon flacks to discredit their own reporters. It’s a neat system.

Needless to say, the analysts are identified not as what they are—individuals with vested political and financial interests in promoting the Pentagon’s agenda—but as independent, expert commentators. Most of the news outlets declined to comment on the extent to which they were aware of the symbiotic relationship between the analysts and the Pentagon, so it’s unclear whether they knew and didn’t care, or whether they didn’t know and didn’t care enough to find out.

Cynics will ask how this differs from the poor reporting and editorial abjectness on Iraq and the War On Terra^® featured in house by the news outlets. The primary differences are that the analysts take money on both ends—paid directly by the news outlets and indirectly, via government contracts and increased market value, by the Pentagon—and that their status as expert commentators lends an extra level of credibility to their analysis; rather than reporting directly what the Pentagon and other administration sources say, they act as cutouts, serving up propaganda at one remove from the source.

The worst one can say of most reporters and editors who fail at their jobs is that whether from ineptness or fear or systemic failure, they do shoddy work; that’s about the best one can say of the analysts participating in the Pentagon program, whose comportment ranges from stenographic to wholly corrupt. Many of them were, in effect, paid undercover political operatives for the administration. Unless the news outlets bar them from further broadcast and print exposure, that’s what they’ll continue to be.

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As regular readers know, the proprietor of this site is at present a somewhat displaced person. Among the contributing causes to that condition is a lack of affordable access to a medication that helps prevent me from living my life in perpetual homage to the last moments of the Wicked Witch of the West. My lack of insurance precludes simply going to a doctor, getting the prescription and filling it, while my continuing possession of some mental faculties precludes getting this state’s Medicaid services. It’s those awkward tween years.

Earlier this week I ran across a local not-for-profit social services organization which employs a limited number of social worker types who serve as case managers dedicated to helping their homeless, often mentally ill and even more often addicted clients navigate the maze of available state, county and private services. To access the social workers, one has to arrive at the office no later than 8AM and sign on to the first-come, first-serve list. In practice the supply and demand ratio requires arriving no later than 7:30AM, and a slot isn’t guaranteed even then; there’s usually a long line and the security guards do a form of triage.

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A Primer on CO₂ and Climate, by Howard C. Hayden
Shadows of the Mind, by Roger Penrose

These are two science-oriented books that that I paired for their controversial viewpoints. Each looks at their respective field from somewhere opposite the consensus, and I’ve found it interesting to contrast their styles and content. In particular, I wanted to avoid an easy dismissal, although I think one of the authors deserves one. Howard C. Hayden is a physics professor (now emeritus) from the University of Connecticut, where I attended grad school, and he has taken up a hobby of climate change denial in the ten years or so since his retirement. I have no reason to believe he’s anything but a qualified atomic physicist, but his dissent to climate change, which is quite unrelated to his field of research, seems to come from a different place. I found his name on the list of academics that petitioned the International Panel for Climate Change, and again as a credentialed speaker classing up a legion of blowhards, think-tankers and non-scientists at the Heartland Institute. (Both of these were pointed out here, by the way.) A shaky pedigree in climatology, but in Hayden’s case I felt obligated to read his pamphlet.

Roger Penrose is a mathematician from Oxford University, and may be superficially considered as taking a similar approach. Shadows of the Mind is no pamphlet, but he, like Hayden, is picking at some of the holes he sees in the established theory (in this case mathematical philosophy and quantum mechanics), but unlike the physicist, he’s trying to find new science in those margins. Artificial intelligence is even farther from my field than climatology, but taking only a logical position, I don’t see either author as right, and their positions are certainly controversial within those communities. Yet one of these men is performing a deep and honest speculative exercise, and one is just being a reflexive asshole.

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I had hoped to provide a detailed breakdown of the various forces operating in Iraq as I understand them, complete with colorful graphics of the sort favored by people testifying to Congress, but that will have to wait until BTC News world headquarters is permanently settled somewhere. (Readers who would like to help advance that happy day are encouraged to contribute a dollar or two via the PayPal graphic on the right). Meanwhile, here’s the short course.

The occupation of Iraq has crippled the US military and budget, and is a drag on an already anemic economy. That wouldn’t matter so much if the occupation hadn’t also helped wreck our foreign policy chops, and if there were some hope of a happy outcome.

But there isn’t. Everyone with an ounce of military expertise, certainly including the sainted General Petraeus and his vaudevillean companion, US amabassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, knows that the US is about 300,000 troops short of being able to field a force large enough to meet Petraeus’s own counterinsurgency and peacekeeping requirements. The counterinsurgency manual for which Petraeus had overall responsibility, and which he helped write, calls for 20 troops per 1,000 local civilians. Iraq has a population of 26 million, which means the size of an effective counterinsurgency and peacekeeping force, according to US doctrine, is about 520,000.

At the height of The Surge, the US had little more than a third that number in Iraq. Even dismissing the need for a substantial force in the increasingly unsettled Kurdish-dominated north, the US forces were undermanned by at least half. And more than the numerical deficit, troops are ill-trained to cope with the unique demands of peacekeeping. The Pentagon tries to fudge the numbers by including Iraqi troops as part of the solution, but, well, you know.

There are at least six sides to the conflict in Iraq. There are three major Shiite parties. Two of them are tight with Iran and favor a federal Iraq, which means semi-autonomous provincial confederations under the loose control of the central government. That’s the Dawa party of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), headed by the al-Hakim family. Both of those organizations enjoy close ties with Iran, with their leaders having spent much of Saddam’s reign in exile in Tehran, and the ISCI’s Badr Brigade militia was organized and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

The third, the Sadrist party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, is profoundly nationalist, profoundly anti-occupation, and uneasy with Iranian influence in Iraq. There are frequent shoving matches between the Sadrists and ISCI, one of which played out as an Iraqi government attempt to dislodge the Sadrists from positions of power in Iraq’s south. That was the Iraqi army invasion of Basra which US officials first touted and then, as it devolved into a stalemate ultimately resolved with the help of Iran (at the behest of ISCI leaders in the Iraqi government), disavowed.

Despite the strong ties between Iran and the two pro-Iranian Iraqi parties that lead Iraq’s government, the Bush administration is constantly accusing Iran of supporting the Sadrists, and the Sadrists of acting as Iranian clients. This is patently untrue and serves the sole purpose of keeping Americans confused about the actual relationship between the Iraqi and Iranian governments—good and getting better—and about Iran’s role in the various internecine conflicts within Iraq.

So that’s three sides, two of which, ISCI and the Sadrists, field serious militias and supply members to the Iraqi police and military.

Then we have the insurgency, which consists of former Baathists, Sunni tribal entities and Sunni religious entities, with considerable overlap. The Sunni tribes are also supplying the forces for the paramilitary organizations known as the “Sunni Awakening,” who are trained and paid by the US to fight still another side, the fundamentalist wackos described by the US as “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Oddly, the 50-70,000 strong Awakening militias have not made all that much progress against the estimated 1,000 or so “Al Qaeda in Iraq” fighters.

So there are another three, possibly four, sides. And of course, there’s us.

That leaves the Kurds, who field their own militia—the country’s largest and most heavily armed— which also supplyies troops to Iraq’s national forces, although they exercise veto power over where and against whom they’re deployed. Oh, and there’s the Turkish Kurds operating from Iraqi territory against the Turkish government. And just for fun, there’s at least one anti-Iran terrorist group in Iraq under US protection, although in theory no longer free to terrorize.

All of these groups have at least one irreconciliable economic, political or religious difference with all of the others. And we’re there in the middle of it, with way too few troops to do aything but keep the pot boiling without blowing up entirely, and way too few good ideas, while they all whittle away at one another and us. And the primary beneficiary of all this has been, so far, Iran. It’s Iran’s buddies running the Iraqi government and agitating for a pro-Iranian federation in the south; it’s Iran’s nightmare enemy, the US, repeatedly ramming its head into the wall and refusing to stanch the resulting wounds.

Invading and occupying Iraq was a horrible idea, on every level, that was executed as miserably as could be imagined, on every level. Staying there all this time, and planning to stay there for basically ever, is just flat batshit crazy. Much of the public knows this, certainly most of the military know it, and one suspects that a large chunk of the Bush administration know it. And yet, for some reason, the notion that US foreign policy at the moment is centered around an endeavor that is obviously, dramatically nuts doesn’t seem to have penetrated into the national discussion at what one might call the referee level, which is to say, the institutional press.

Oh well.

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By now you may know that top Bush administration officials, with the knowledge and approval of the president, choreographed torture regimens for terrorism suspects held by the US. You probably haven’t heard much about the reaction from Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

That’s because they haven’t reacted. Like most of the press, Clinton and Obama appear not to see anything particularly unusual or worthy of comment in the news that the president, vice president, secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, the attorney general and others operating from the White House situation room personally and in considerable detail schemed to violate US domestic law and the Geneva Conventions, which hold the force of law in the US because this country signed them. In common parlance, people who do that are called war criminals.

To repeat: every cabinet official in the Bush administration with national security responsibilities, plus the vice president of the country, with the knowledge and blessing of the president, participated in detailed discussions on how to torture US prisoners. The president has openly admitted to approving a conspiracy to commit war crimes, and neither the press, for the most part, nor either of the opposition party candidates likely to be the next president, seem concerned.

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The news that senior Bush administration officials not only approved the use of torture but actually micromanaged the application of it should be the last straw for dithering Democrats in the House of Representatives.

We have known for years that the president and the vice president approved war crimes, including torture, on the basis of legal opinions provided by Justice Department functionaries authorizing the president to break any law in the name of national security. Now we know that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other top officials sat in the White House situation room dictated specific combinations of outlawed interrogation techniques—including waterboarding and physical beatings—for specific prisoners.

One of the great tragedies of the Bush administration is the lassitude, often appearing to shade into cowardice, displayed by those in opposition to it. The Democratic leadership in Congress refuses to consider impeachment as an option for dealing with a transparently criminal president and vice president, and very few major voices on the liberal end of the spectrum have chided them for it. Liberal blogging powerhouse Atrios today called Rice and company “monsters” and “war criminals” who should all be in jail for their actions; what, then, does that make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers and others who have the option of at least attempting to evict the monsters from the national house but have failed to act?

Maybe the personal involvement, the image of Condoleezza Rice sitting in the White House situation room discussing with Colin Powell and Dick Cheney how often Abu Zubaydah should be subjected to drowning, perhaps while watching the videos of their handiwork on the big screen TV—those infamous now-destroyed CIA videos—will be enough to motivate Conyers to finally begin hearings on whether or not the administration have committed impeachable offenses.

Pelosi Pelosi can be written off as a lost cause: as we’ve noted in the past, she is herself complicit in the administration’s crimes, albeit as a bystander, because she knew for years that their agenda included torture and she did nothing to stop it. If Conyers, though, is finally moved to act, Pelosi can do little to stop him without overtly incriminating herself.

Journalist Laura Rozen, who writes often on intelligence issues, suspects that the ABC News story regarding the personal involvement of Rice and others can be sourced to CIA officials angry at being exclusively tarred as torturers. She notes further that her own reporting and the ABC story suggest that there is a paper trail indicating which administration officials signed off on what torture aimed at which suspects—exactly the sort of documentation that from Nuremberg on has spelled doom for meticulous war criminals the world over.

It’s there: someone has to go get it. The person in the best position to do so is John Conyers. I urge anyone who has even the slightest interest in bringing our monsters to justice, or at least preventing them from ending their terms in office unscathed, to contact Conyers and politely urge him to investigate these new revelations. You can reach him by email or telephone at:
john.conyers@mail.house.gov
(202) 225-5126 (voice)
(202) 225-0072 (FAX)

Following is the email I sent to Conyers tonight. Feel free to borrow it.

The Honorable John Conyers
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Rep. Conyers:

You’re no doubt aware of the ABC News report alleging that current and former senior Bush administration officials were actively involved in dictating specific acts of torture from the White House to be used against various terrorism suspects. As you know, torture is a violation of domestic and international law. I strongly urge you to convene hearings and demand the appearance of those officials named in the ABC report—Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Porter Goss, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and John Ashcroft—for the purpose of determining whether they committed war crimes and, in the case of Mr. Cheney and his immediate supervisor, whether their actions constitute impeachable offenses warranting removal from office. The image presented by top US officials authorizing and managing the torture of US prisoners from the White House is both nauseating and immensely harmful to the interests of our country, and only a prompt and thorough investigation can begin to mitigate the damage. I know that you take your oath of office seriously; if there is ever to be a moment when the Constitution requires your defense, it has arrived.

Sincerely,
Weldon Berger

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Political junkies in this campaign season will probably recognize that quote as emanating from Ross Perot’s vice-presidential candidate, the late Admiral James Stockdale, during the vice presidential debate of 1992 between him, Dan Quayle and Al Gore.

I bring this up because not long ago I found myself at televangelist Robert Shuler’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Since I’m both Jewish and nontheistic, the experience was a bit odd. Following are a few photos from the visit, along with brief explications of my immediate reactions to the subjects. We begin with proof that Starbucks is indeed everywhere, as witness this sign—”It’s a sign!”—downstairs from the gift shop.

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