Ethics Newsline®

“Under reasonable scenarios, assuming we don’t pull out rapidly, we may only be halfway through. Even in direct budgetary costs, it’s quite easy to get up on the order of $1 trillion for Iraq alone.”

– Steven Koziak, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a nonpartisan research group, speaking to the New York Times about the cost of the Iraq war. As the U.S. engagement in Iraq marks its five-year anniversary, the Times examines a range of views on why most estimates of the war’s cost were vastly wrong, how much the entanglement ultimately may cost, and the motives of those providing the estimates.

Source: New York Times, Mar. 19.

“The government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin. They’ve learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it.”

– Michael Anti, speaking to the Los Angeles Times about the Chinese government’s increasingly savvy spinning of news events like the current clashes between Tibetan monks, government forces, and local peoples. As the Chinese government faces increasing difficulties in wholly blocking information and coverage from the outside world, it is using videos, terminology, and propaganda to cast its opponents as attackers of the Chinese people, note observers like Anti, “a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard,” according to the Times.

Source: Los Angeles Times, Mar. 17.

For more information, see: Los Angeles Times, Mar. 17 — New York Times, Mar. 17.

“I will govern by continuing with the things that we’ve done well and correcting mistakes. I will govern for all, but thinking above all of those people who do not have everything.”

– Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, speaking at a victory celebration on Monday after his governing Socialist party narrowly won reelection, edging out conservatives in a much-watched contest that pitted religious and social conservatives against those supporting Zapatero’s current path of liberalization and expanding rights

Source: New York Times, Mar. 10.

“Most fraud occurs when election officials compile lists of voters, including people who are not eligible to vote in their district.”

– Lilia Shibanova, head of Golos, the only independent Russian election monitoring group, speaking to the Moscow Times about alleged violations in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential election installing Dmitry Medvedev as the next head of Russia. Medvedev, hand-picked by outgoing president Vladimir Putin, who is widely expected to remain in control of the country, was elected after opposition candidates were barred from the election.

While authorities “either denied any voting irregularities or dismissed them as negligible,” the Moscow Times reports that “numerous observers and voters called the Golos hotline and reported incidents of ballot boxes being stuffed ahead of the vote.”

Source: Moscow Times, Mar. 3.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Dec. 4, 2006 — Related Newsline Commentary, Nov. 20, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2006 — Related Newsline story, June 5, 2006 — Related Newsline story, June 6, 2005.

“Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors. It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”

– Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, speaking to the New York Times about a new poll from the Pew Research Center that tracks the U.S. population’s adoption, abandonment, and switching of religious affiliation. The poll found that “more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion,” with “more than 16 percent of American adults say[ing] they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest ‘religious group,’” notes the Times.

Source: New York Times, Feb. 25.

For more information, see: Full press release from Pew, Feb. 25 — TIME magazine, Feb. 25.

“The Parliament is today here assembled to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia…. We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.”

– Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, speaking before the nation’s Parliament last week and apologizing for past governments’ treatment of tens of thousands of the country’s Aborigine population. Rudd said the apology was a paramount priority of his new labor government, which “was sworn in Tuesday after a convincing electoral win over the 11-year administration of John Howard, who had for years refused to apologize for the misdeeds of past governments,” reports the New York Times.

Source: New York Times, Feb. 13.

For more information, see: Text of Rudd’s speech to Parliament, Feb. 13 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 24, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2002 — Related Newsline story, July 10, 2000.

“This whole conspiracy corrupted the law firm and it corrupted it in the most evil way.”

– U.S. District Judge John Walter, speaking at the sentencing hearing for William Lerach, a high-profile New York lawyer convicted for his role in paying $11.3 million in kickbacks to professional plaintiffs who would enroll to sue companies targeted by Lerach’s former firm, Milberg Weiss. On Monday, Judge Walter ordered Lerach to serve two years in federal prison, two years of probation, pay a $250,000 fine, and complete 1,000 hours of community service, reports the Associated Press.

Source: AP, Feb. 11.

“Barbed-wire barricades surround the residence, and all phone lines are cut. Even the water connection to my residence has been periodically turned off. I am being persuaded to resign and to forego my office, which is what I am not prepared to do…. There can be no democracy without an independent judiciary, and there can be no independent judge in Pakistan until the action of Nov. 3 is reversed. Whatever the will of some desperate men, the struggle of the valiant lawyers and civil society of Pakistan will bear fruit. They are not giving up.”

– From an open letter released last week by Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the former chief justice of Pakistan, who was removed from office and placed under virtual house arrest by Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf shortly before a supreme court ruling that was expected to find it illegal for Musharraf to continue running the country. Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, suspended the constitution, shut down the nation’s private TV stations, and jailed several justices and lawyers of the supreme court, sparking a groundswell of anger and discontent that continues to simmer, according to the New York Times.

Source: New York Times, Jan. 31.

For more information, see: Text of Chaudhry’s open letter, via the New York Times — Related Newsline story, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 5, 2007.

“Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.”

– A scientific team led by Jan Zalasiewicz, writing in the February issue of GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America. Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams of the University of Leicester and colleagues at the Geological Society of London argue that human activity has sufficiently altered the environment that the Holocene era has ended and a new era, the Anthropocene has begun — an idea “first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen” that has gained added momentum lately, according to LiveScience.

Source: LiveScience, Jan. 27.

For more information, see: GSA Today article, “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” abstract and full text.

“I’m not sure what was said on that. I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.”

– White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, responding to questions last week about a newly released report that found “473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices,” reports the Washington Post. The 2005 internal study of White House electronic communications renewed attention to the controversy surrounding White House recordkeeping. The dispute centers on questions about “whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records — including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions — for history and in case of any future legal demands,” notes the Post.

Source: Washington Post, Jan. 18.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 25, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 19, 2007.

“We thank the attorneys general for a thoughtful and constructive conversation on Internet safety. This is an industrywide challenge, and we must all work together to create a safer Internet.”

– MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam in a written statement announcing an initiative to make the popular social networking safer for children who could be targets of online sexual predators. The move follows negotiations between the company and officials from 49 states, reports the Washington Post.

Source: Washington Post, Jan. 14.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 3, 2007 — Related Newsline Commentary, July 10, 2006.

“After that day, people looked at us a little different. There was a palpable feeling…. We knew that something monumental had happened, that we were in deep water. And we felt like we weren’t getting anything done. We were going up and coming down, but they weren’t listening to a darn thing we were saying…. We sent many memos up the chain of command. I thought it was a huge issue. The coalition knew about it, but … nothing was ever done. I felt it was completely ignored. I mean, how many of these incidents does it take before you’re finally aware?”

– Matthew Degn, a U.S. army veteran, civilian contractor, and senior policy adviser to Iraq’s Interior Ministry, talking to the Washington Post about the effect of the Sep. 16 killing of Iraqi civilians by guards from the private U.S. security firm Blackwater. According to Degn and others who spoke to the Post, the U.S. government “disregarded numerous warnings over the past two years about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq, expanding their presence even after a series of shooting incidents showed that the firms were operating with little regulation or oversight, according to government officials, private security firms and documents.”

Source: Washington Post, Dec. 24, 2007.

“To a spectator it would look like torture. And torture is wrong.”

– John Gannon, a former CIA. deputy director, talking to the New York Times about the content of terrorist interrogation videotapes destroyed by the CIA. In a Sunday piece, the Times chronicles the shift in political and legal considerations that prompted both the decision to tape the interrogations as well as the later decision to destroy them after waterboarding began.

Source: New York Times, Dec. 30.

“This is a day of progress for us and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder.”

– New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, speaking on Monday after signing into a law a measure abolishing the death penalty in his state. The Washington Post notes that New Jersey’s action makes it “the first state in more than four decades to reject capital punishment.”

Source: Washington Post, Dec. 17.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request. No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings.”

– Philip Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, talking to the New York Times about the recent revelation that the CIA destroyed hundred of hours of taped interrogations in contravention of the advice of White House and Justice Department lawyers. Both the Justice Department and the CIA’s inspector general have launched a preliminary inquiry into the tapes’ destruction, which took place in 2005, but was only publicly revealed last week after pressure from the Times.

“There is an unrealistic or even impractical obsession with your form of democracy, human rights, and civil liberties, which you have taken centuries to acquire and which you expect us to adopt in a few years, in a few months. We want democracy; I am for democracy. We want human rights, we want civil liberties, but we will do it our way, as we understand our society, our environment, better than anyone in the West.”

– Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, speaking last week to an audience that included Western diplomats after being sworn in as the country’s civilian president

“The nearly 8 percent rise in the number of hate crimes is obviously of concern, but the truth is that the FBI’s data severely undercount the number of hate crimes each year.”

– Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies hate crimes, talking to the Associated Press about the jump last year in reported hate crimes over the year before. FBI statistics indicate that at least “9,000 offenses were committed because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability last year,” reports the Washington Post.

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence, or reduces the number of sexual partners” among teenagers.

– Text from a new study from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonpartisan group that analyzed research into teens’ sexual behavior. Unlike abstinence-only programs, comprehensive programs supporting both abstinence and contraception “were having ‘positive outcomes’ including teenagers ‘delaying the initiation of sex, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners and increasing condom or contraceptive use,’ ” according to the report.

“You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

– Iowa waitress Anita Esterday, talking to a reporter about the press ruckus over whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign had left a tip after eating at the Maid-Rite diner where Esterday works

“If you don’t have television, you don’t have crowds.”

“It’s hard to make arguments that the bulk of what is being provided by the U.S. is very effective for counter-terrorism operations. A lot of the military assistance has been much more useful for a potential war with India.”