Confessions Part 2 As We Leave Anchorage

I posted some thoughts on confessions just before boarding a plane to Seattle.  But I had more thoughts as we took off and before we got into the clouds.

Cook Inlet Ice as we take off

Making a Murderer is a disturbing yet compelling Netflix documentary series.  I gave some details of the confession - what it sounded like in the news and how it was actually obtained - in the previous post.

Here are some more thoughts the show raised for me.

Some specific issues for me:

The Certainty of the prosecutors and the defense attorneys.  The prosecutor and the investigators - even the initial court appointed defense attorney - were all certain that Steve Avery (Brendan's uncle) was guilty and that Brendan was an accomplice.  They didn't even consider other leads.  This certainty seemed to justify the way they got the confession.  They knew for sure that Brendan was guilty and they just needed to get him to admit it.  The defense attorneys were also certain.  The first court appointed attorney was sure of his guilt.  Later, the better attorneys who took over were sure of Steven Avery's and Brendan's innocence.  It's the job of the defense attorney to defend the accused.  But it's the job of the prosecutor to uphold justice.  His job in court is to present the evidence against the accused, but when information comes out that raises doubts, he should just relentlessly go after a conviction.  If the wrong person is convicted, it means the actual murderer is still loose and liable to find new victims.


Getting a Confession - How far to push?  If someone is guilty, it's better for the prosecution to get a confession.  It makes it easier to convict and you can get evidence on other culprits.  Prosecutors even make deals with suspects - 'We'll offer you less time in prison if you confess and cooperate with us on others involved in the crime."  It can also save the time and expense of a long trial if the suspect confesses and pleads guilty.  And if there is still an imminent danger - an unknown partner in crime still on the loose and dangerous - there is the added urgency of protecting people from harm right now.

Foraker and Denali Get Some Morning Sun

But what if the suspect is not guilty?  How far should the interrogator push?  This was a big issue with Guantanamo prisoners and waterboarding and other torture.  If the suspect is not guilty, one is inflicting unnecessary pain and/or anguish to an innocent victim or one gets a false confession when the suspect says whatever the interrogator wants him to say.

Findlaw tells us this was the reason for the protections against self incrimination in the US Constitution:

"The right against self-incrimination is rooted in the Puritans’ refusal to cooperate with interrogators in 17th century England. They often were coerced or tortured into confessing their religious affiliation and were considered guilty if they remained silent. English law granted its citizens the right against self-incrimination in the mid-1600s, when a revolution established greater parliamentary power.
Puritans who fled religious persecution brought this idea with them to America, where it would eventually become codified in the Bill of Rights. Today, courts have found the right against self-incrimination to include testimonial or communicative evidence at police interrogations and legal proceedings."

Getting a Confession - Use of Guile:  

Another issue is the use of lies to get a confession.  Interrogators led Brendan to believe that by telling the truth he would make his troubles go away.  He told them he needed to get back to school so he could turn in a paper and they implied that he needed to answer the questions first.  They asked if he wanted to go to prison for the rest of his life and when he said no, they said, then write down what you did.  They told him, "We know what you did, we just want you to say it."  Well, they didn't know.

About to fly up Eagle River valley 

Frontline tells a similar story about a girl name Troung:

"The detective also tells her that, if she confesses, they’ll “walk right out here, to special
crimes juvenile” to “talk to a social worker.” If not, he’ll consult with the medical examiner and start working on a murder case against her. . .
Finally Truong confesses, after being reassured by the detective that “maybe something good will come out of all this,” and that the courts will decide on what “treatment” she should get in the juvenile system. . ."

When you are dealing with a guilty suspect, you may have to use tricks to break them down and confess.  There are lots of strategies that we see in cop movies all the time, like Good Cop/Bad Cop.  But how does that work with the not guilty suspect?

The Frontline show goes on to say false confessions aren't as rare as people think.

"But are false confessions actually that rare? Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who recently wrote a book called Convicting the Innocent, says his research “suggests that innocents actually confess to a lot.” Forty of the first 250 people exonerated based on DNA evidence, or 16 percent, falsely confessed."

And why do people confess falsely?  They quote Troung about why she confessed, which sounds similar to Brendan's story:

So why did Truong confess to something she says she didn’t do? Why would anyone? “It was a pretty long two hours,” she told Boeri, “and all I could hear throughout those two hours was that they were going to give me help if I confessed.”

They falsely told her and Brendan that all they had to do was confess and they could go home.  In Brendan's case, that's all he wanted - to go home.  But they lied to him and chained him up and imprisoned him.  Is that kind of lying acceptable?

I think that different techniques are acceptable in different circumstances.  I'm not sure where the lines should be drawn, but introverted kids, like Brendan, with a low IQ and an inability to understand what is happening, are clearly on the no guile side of the line.  More important than locating that line, may be to insure that the person has an attorney present, though in Brendan's case, his attorney was part of the problem - enough so to be kicked off the case by the judge.

And over the Chugach 

Innocent or Guilty Presumption And The Need For Closure

We have trials to determine guilt or innocence.  The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  Yet in the Avery case and in Brendan's case, it's clear that even Brendan's attorney considered him guilty.  (see the previous post on this.)
The Sheriff - It's critical police keep open some doubt about the suspect's guilt, simply so they don't stop looking for other suspects.  In Steven Avery's case, the sheriff's office ignored a tip from the local police that there was another suspect they'd been surveilling, except for the time of the crime.  That other suspect eventually - after Avery served 18 years in prison - was proven to be the culprit.  And he committed more crimes in the meantime.  And Avery, through DNA tests was proven not to be.
The Victim's Family - They want to believe the person who did that to their family member has been caught and punished.  In the Avery/Dacey cases, the victim's brother was certain from Day 1 that Avery and Dacey (Kevin) were guilty.  They ignored the inconsistencies.  But the family really does have an interest in the real perpetrator being caught and punished.  In Avery's original conviction (when he was proven innocent later) the victim positively identified him.  But later on, when the DNA proved he hadn't done it, she apologized.
The Media - They want to sell advertising.  They have a strong incentive to report the most titillating stories they can.  The reports of Brendan's confession dripped with blood and sex and murder.  The reports made it sound like Brendan, after stewing on this for months, came in and spilled his guts.  There's no hint the police picked him up at school and painstakingly fed him the story they believed and manipulated him until he eventually wrote what they wanted him to write.  The media didn't ncecssarily presume guilt as much as presume that sensationalism gets ratings.  But in going for gore, they planted the the presumption of guilt in the minds of their viewers and probably in their own minds.


Need For Closure
I suspect that the quick presumption of guilt in this case reflected a very human need for closure.
The Sheriff - When a brutal crime is committed in a small town, law enforcement has to feel some responsibility for not having prevented it.  Thus the sooner they catch the culprit, the closer they are to redeeming themselves.  And there has to be at least subconscious antagonism toward the suspect for making them look bad.
The Victim's Family - They too want to put this to rest as quickly as possible.  Knowing the person who hurt or killed your family member has been caught and is being punished, for many, is a big part of the grievance process.  Retribution seems to be part of human society.  So much so that punishing the wrong person is not a worry for most victims' relatives.  I'm not saying they knowingly will accept any culprit to punish, guilty or not, but rather their need for retribution helps them see guilt, even in the innocent.
The Media - They probably have the least need for closure, as the 2014 Republican presidential race demonstrates.  As long as an issue gets viewers and sells advertisements, they'll feed it to us.
The Public - They share the police and victim's family needs.  They want to know the perpetrator is off the streets and they are safe so they can go on leading their lives normally.  They want to believe that justice will prevail.  They've watched enough police and lawyer television shows that they believe that in the end, the smart defense attorney will pull her client out of the fire.  Until they experience their own injustice at the hands of the police or the courts, they just want the culprit caught and punished and they don't probe too deeply into the matter.


One Other Issue - Media Manipulation Of Trials

My sense is that the filmmakers seriously made this film because they thought an injustice was done.  At least that's how it came across to me.  But how do any of us know whether they fairly represented all sides of this case?  Because they were taking the side of the economically and educationally poor, outsiders of this community against the establishment - particularly the sheriff department and the court system - that their motives are relatively clean.  But then, how poor are the Avery's?  They've got 40 acres of land, they've got a great vegetable garden.  Is there a bigger story that the filmmakers missed that someone is trying to get their land?  Probably not.  It's upstate Wisconsin and there is probably plenty of land available.  You see how many threads one could unravel and follow here?

The film makers here did a great job of mixing entertainment and documentary.  A documentary should be accurate and explain complicated relationships AND be interesting to the viewer so they watch the whole thing.  That happened here.  I know my wife and I were totally pulled into the story and we were rooting for the good guys and angry at the bad guys.  The filmmakers succeeded in their mission.

 But will others see this model and do similar types of films, but with a sponsored message?  Will corporations use this style to push their agendas?  Will criminal organizations make similar films to make their own members look innocent?  This documentary wasn't available when El Chapo met with Sean Penn, but maybe he was thinking along the same lines.

OK, there are all kinds of directions this can go.  Lots of issues.  But enough now.

On The Edge Of Snow - And OLÉ Classes Continue

It was in the mid 30s when I went to Pecha Kucha class yesterday, but the streets were good, so I biked.  My presentation was ok, people said nice things afterward.  Here's the first of the 20 slides.

and I tried to make the case for how learning another languages let's you escape the confines of English (or whatever your first language is) as you learn that the words and grammar of one language reflect the world differently from other languages.  This shows most concretely in the fact that words of one language don't translate exactly into the words of the other language.  Even concrete objects might not translate right.  Banana would seem an easy translation, but in Thailand there are about 20 kinds of bananas that regularly show up in the market and many people there pick bananas off trees in their garden.   And that, say, a black cat, has meanings in one culture that it might not have in another.  And words that describe relationships get even trickier.

The Thai words closest to brother and sister really focus on the older/younger relationship more than the gender relationship, or even the blood relationship

People without any blood connection use the terms for older and younger about each other all the time. (And it's different from the more recent US use of 'Bro'.)  At one point I asked somebody, after he'd introduced me to his sixth or seventh 'brother', how many brothers did he have.  Oh, they aren't that kind of brother, he said.

The class liked the blue and red circles I used to show how much the English and German or Thai words overlapped.  I didn't think of that until I was finishing the last slide, the night before the presentation.  Then I went back and put in circles for the different slides that compared English and German or English and Thai words.  Good thing I did.  I argued that when the words don't overlap completely (usually the case) is when you learn what your own language doesn't capture about the world.  And the less the words overlap, the more you learn about yourself and the world.

It was just starting to rain when I returned yesterday.  It was more a light drizzle, and the drops were tiny specks of hail.  Much better than raindrops, not as good as snow.  I could feel them on my face.  But I got home fine, but I was expecting snow on the ground this morning.

There wasn't any and the street in front of our house was wet, but not icy.  And large chunks of sky were blue.   So I biked.  For the most part it was ok but then I saw a police car's lights flashing ahead and this car on the side of the road.

The culprit seems to have been a piece of light brick colored cement at the intersection.  While all the other surfaces were fine, that piece of cement was really slick.  Was there a second car involved?  I don't know.  A stop sign had been flattened.  (I thought I took a picture, but it's not on my phone.)  I walked the bike around the debris and down the hill.  Back on the flat I rode carefully to the church where today's OLÉ classes were held.

By 2:30 when I came back, the sun was out and any ice or frost that had been there was either a puddle or dry pavement.  But I did have two voices in my head this morning.  One said:  "Don't be such a wimp.  You can't let a little weather threat keep you off the bike."  The other said, "A broken arm would really be a pain.  Don't be stupid."  Stupid beat wimp today, but I know I should be more careful.

The classes today were good.  The Innocence Project class was a continuation of last week's list of reasons innocent people are convicted.  I'll put that into another post.  It's interesting.  And this class is a great one after seeing "When They See Us" the Netflix series on the Central Park Five case.  Everything they talk about in the class happens in the series.

The afternoon class was on Pebble Mine.   We've had a representative from Pebble. A person from the Army Corps of Engineers, whose in charge of the Environmental Impact Statement, and today, was someone from Bristol Bay Native Corporation who are strongly opposed to the mine.

Cronyism and the University of Alaska

Patrick Gamble and the University got married less than a year ago.  And here he's gone out and bought a '56 Corvette from a buddy who gave him a good deal, without consulting his spouse who had a new Subaru in mind.  Is this going to be the pattern in this marriage or is he going to talk things out next time before he makes what should be a family decision?   This spouse isn't like his first two.  She expects to be a full partner in this marriage she was pressured into. Is he going to have to be firm until she shapes up or can he learn to enjoy life with an equal partner?

For a linked list of the other posts on the Chancellor search click here.


This post comes in several parts:

1. What is cronyism?
2. Is the appointment of Tom Case as UAA Chancellor by his fellow retired Air Force general an example of cronyism? (An aside raises the same question about Craig Campbell's appointment as Case's replacement at the Alaska Aerospace Corporation.)
   
3. Why is this worth blogging about?
   

[This is a long post, so here's a brief SYNOPSIS:  Case's appointment fits three of the four criteria of cronyism and may well fit part of the fourth.  President Gamble's decision to by-pass a normal participatory search process and to ignore unanimous Faculty Senate recommendations makes the case for cronyism more plausible.  This suspicion is exacerbated by Case's same day replacement as head of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation.  With that said, Case is clearly qualified to head UAA, but not necessarily the best qualified.  The faculty and students and rest of the campus community have to determine whether Gamble has knowingly abused his power to hire a friend or truly didn't understand the academic culture.  If the latter, he has demonstrated why bringing in another leader from outside the academic culture is problematic to many.  The UAA community will also have to assess whether Gamble is willing and capable of respecting and adopting the culture.]

1.   What is CRONYISM?

Cronyism: partiality to cronies especially as evidenced in the appointment of political hangers-on to office without regard to their qualifications  (Merriam Webster online)

So, what's a crony?   From Websters online dictionary:

Specialty Definition: crony

Domain	Definition
Noah Webster	[Noun] An intimate companion; an associate; a familiar friend. To oblige your crony Swift, bring our dame a new years gift. Hence, an old crony is an intimate friend of long standing.. Source: Webster's 1828 American Dictionary.
Literature	Crony A familiar friend. An old crony is an intimate of times gone by. Probably crone with the diminutive ie for endearment, and equivalent to "dear old fellow," "dear old boy." (See Crone.). Source: Brewer's Dictionary.
Slang in 1811	CRONY. An intimate companion, a comrade; also a confederate in a robbery. Source: 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
Wiktionary	1: [Noun] Close friend. (references)
	2: [Noun] Trusted companion or partner in a criminal organization. (references)

Let's look at a few more ways to define Cronyism:

From the business dictionary online:  

The act of showing partiality to one's close friends, typically by appointing them to a position in a company or organization despite the individual not necessarily being the best person for the position. Although this is [sic] favoritism is frowned upon in many cases, it is often hard to determine what is or is not cronyism. In general it is not wrong to hire or appoint someone you know, as long as they are well qualified, so the boundary between the two scenarios is very unclear. Although accusations of cronyism are prevalent, they very rarely amount to any disciplinary action or removals from power. See also nepotism.

from Encarta:

doing favors for friends: special treatment and preference given to friends or colleagues, especially in politics ( disapproving)

Most of the definitions I found were close variations of these.  So from these  definitions we can pull out the common factors:

1. Partiality or favoritism
   
   
2. Towards a good friend
   
   
3. Usually through an appointment to a position for which the friend is
   
   
4. Unqualified OR not the best qualified

Wikipedia's discussion of cronyism gives more nuance to the term showing why it happens and how it relates to other terms we know such as networking or good old boys system:

Governments are particularly susceptible to accusations of cronyism, as they spend public money. Many democratic governments are encouraged to practice administrative transparency in accounting and contracting, however, there often is no clear delineation of when an appointment to government office is "cronyism".

It is not unusual for a politician to surround him- or herself with highly-qualified subordinates, and to develop social, business, or political friendships leading to the appointment to office of friends, likewise in granting government contracts. In fact, the counsel of such friends is why the officeholder successfully obtained his or her powerful position — therefore, cronyism usually is easier to perceive than to demonstrate and prove.

In the private sector, cronyism exists in organizations, often termed 'the old boys club' or 'the golden circle', again the boundary between cronyism and 'networking' is difficult to delineate.

Moreover, cronyism describes relationships existing among mutual acquaintances in private organizations where business, business information, and social interaction are exchanged among influential personnel. This is termed crony capitalism, and is an ethical breach of the principles of the market economy; in advanced economies, crony capitalism is a breach of market regulations, e.g., the Enron fraud is an extreme example of crony capitalism.

2. Is the appointment of Tom Case by his fellow retired Air Force general an example of cronyism?

 

Cronyism, like most things, isn't either/or, isn't black or white.  There are situations which are clearly not and situations which clearly are, and more ambiguous ones in the middle.  But let's go through these four factors:

1. Partiality or favoritism
   We know that UA President Gamble knew there would be a vacancy for the UAA Chancellorship even before he took the job.  It was ten months after Chancellor Ulmer announced she would retire, before Gamble began the search process late November 2010.
   We know that the UAA Faculty Senate - on notice that Gamble was considering skipping a national search - unanimously recommended their Provost as the candidate they could live with should he choose to NOT have a national search.
   We know the next public step was that Gamble appointed Tom Case to be Chancellor.
   
   
2. Towards a good friend (All Air Force career information comes from the Air Force webpages for Gamble and Case.)
   
   Gamble graduated from Texas A&M and became a student, undergraduate pilot training, Randolph Air Force Base, Texas  in 1967. 
   Case graduated from the Air Force Academy and became a student in the Undergraduate Pilot Training, Laughlin AFB, Texas in 1969.
   I'm not sure when they met, but both careers included assignments in Vietnam, Korea, Europe, and Washington DC. 
   
   Gamble (August 1996 - November 1997) and Case (October 1998 - September 2000) were both commander, Alaskan Command, Alaskan North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, 11th Air Force and Joint Task Force Alaska, Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.
   
   And they served together in Hawaii when Gamble (July 1998 - May 2001) was commander, Pacific Air Forces, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, and Case  (September 2000 - July 2002) was Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff, U.S. Pacific Command, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii.
   
   From the US Pacific Command website: we learn, if I read this right, that Gamble would have reported directly to Case's boss.
   

   Commander, U.S. Pacific Command (CDRUSPACOM) is the senior U.S. military authority in the Pacific Command AOR.  CDRUSPACOM reports to the President of the United States through the Secretary of Defense and is supported by four component commands: U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Army Pacific, and U.S. Marine Forces, Pacific.  These commands are headquartered in Hawai’i and have forces stationed and deployed throughout the region. 

   Both men retired to Anchorage where Gamble became head of the Alaska Railroad and Case became, first, Dean of the UAA College of Business and Public Affairs (where he was my boss) and then COO of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation. 
   
   
3. Usually through an appointment to a position for which the friend is
   
   Search committees are the norm for faculty and high level administrative positions at the University of Alaska Anchorage - usually national searches.  The previous Chancellors at UAA and UAF were not selected through nationwide searches, but faculty and community members were involved and approved of the selections.  See previous post footnote beginning at "*I'd point out" for how those searches were conducted.
   
   In this case,
   
   • Nov. 23, 2010:  the President announced the beginning of the search and hinted at skipping a national search because there were good Alaskan candidates. 
   • Dec. 6, 2010:  The faculty responded by proposing the current UAA Provost for Chancellor.  If not him, then they wanted a national search. 
   • Jan 18, 2011: The President brought together a committee and asked them to come up with characteristics of a good Chancellor.
   • Jan 31, 2011:  The President announced Tom Case as the new Chancellor
     
     
   The President skipped the normal search process, rejected the faculty's proposed candidate without consultation, did not consult with the faculty or other normal constituents about possible specific candidates, and simply selected someone he'd known in his previous career who was also a personal friend. 
   
   
4. Unqualified OR not the best qualified
   
   Unqualified?  - The Chancellor has a leadership position which requires good management skills and an ability to work well in the community for  university support and partnerships and for fund raising.  Generally, someone from inside the academic profession with the highest academic credentials (a doctorate) is chosen because they know the culture and norms of the institution they will lead.  This is  occasionally waived if the candidate has other remarkable qualities. 
   
   Tom Case does not have a doctorate, but he has a masters in systems management and a great deal of education and training in the Air Force plus experience leading large organizations.  He also spent five years as Dean of UAA's College of Business and Public Affairs.  In that position he expanded his widespread contacts in Anchorage and Alaska developed earlier as Commandant of Elmendorf Air Force Base.
   
   There is no question in my mind that Tom Case is qualified for this position.
   
   Best Qualified? - This is a question that might still be debated if there were a national search and there were several candidates.  There might never be absolute unanimity.  There are factors to criticize with his candidacy.
   
   • He doesn't have an academic background so he doesn't understand the culture of people he will be leading.  But this isn't enough to make him unacceptable.  Sometimes an outsider can bring in new ideas.  Another factor arises if we take the macro view.  Not just how this decision affects the one campus - UAA - but the impact on the University of Alaska system.  As I've pointed out in a previous post.
   • There will now be four white males over 60 without terminal degrees in the four top posts of the university.  While these four men are each unique individuals and have their own perspectives and experiences, 
   • having other perspectives is both symbolically and substantively important.  The fact that this wasn't considered too important by the President is also troubling.  Also, as I've said, 
   • having outsiders in academia is not necessarily a bad thing.  But two retired Air Force generals in the top four positions seems redundant. We've wasted an opportunity to have a different perspective among the top four positions.  Why?  Simply because Gamble is more comfortable with an old Air Force colleague?  That's not good enough unless he brings in other qualities so special they make him clearly better than other candidates.
   
   
But we can't even consider whether he is the best candidate because there are no other candidates.

So, is this cronyism?  Pat Gamble hasn't told us his motives (other than saving money by not having a national search).  It is clear that it meets at least three and possibly four of the standard benchmarks of cronyism.

1. He used partiality or favoritism - he chose someone he already knew and was partial to without letting any other applicants into the process.  He chose another academic cultural immigrant from the Air Force.  While he may think he has simply chosen the best possible person for the position, in fact he picked a friend without considering others.   He didn't even discuss with the faculty the person they recommended and why they supported him and why he (Gamble) didn't. 
   
   But he clearly decided that despite coming from a different organizational culture - two actually if we include his time with the Alaska Railroad which seems to be a particularly 'good old boy' system - that he knew better than the faculty, without even having to talk to them about their candidate and his.  Or any other possible candidates a nationwide search would produce.
   
   
2. The person he chose is a personal friend and professional colleague.
   
   
3. He did this through an appointment that was a deviation from the standard process.  While there had been some deviation in past appointments, this one was extreme by totally excluding the faculty and others in the university community.  The past searches for UAA and UAF chancellors deviated by not having a national search, but the conditions were different and shared governance wasn't abandoned in those cases.  One major concern, I understand, for the faculty is fear that the exceptions will become the new norm and this appointment will set a precedent for skipping national searches and search committees altogether.
   
   
4. Tom Case is clearly qualified, but not necessarily the best qualified.  We don't know whether he is the best qualified because Gamble's process excluded competition against which to measure Case.  

The suspect nature of this case is exacerbated by the fact that on the same day that Gamble sent out his email announcing that he had chosen Case, the Alaska Aerospace Corporation  announced that Case had been replaced by former Lt. Governor Craig Campbell whose term had recently ended - another former Air Force/National Guard General (though elevated, as I understand it, through a different procedure to fill the position of Adjutant General of the Alaska Air National Guard, and promoted to Lt. General by Gov. Sarah Palin.)

How hard is it to imagine Gamble and Case and Campbell at a party discussing what Campbell would do after his term was over?  "You know, there's an opening for Chancellor coming up.  I can appoint Tom to that - he was a dean there already - and then Craig, you can take Tom's spot."  Actually, I do have trouble imagining Tom Case in that meeting, but somebody must have discussed this for it all to happen so quickly and smoothly.  Too quickly. Too smoothly. 

The University of Alaska is a state organization and the Aerospace Corporation is state created and largely state funded. These are positions with serious salaries. The Chancellor gets about $250,000 plus benefits.

3. Why is this worth blogging about?

I've learned over the years that cronyism, like other ethical infractions, is  "something that other people do, but not me."   While working with Municipal Assembly members, for example, on rewriting the Municipal Code of Ethics, I had assembly members defend their right to have lobbyists pay for their lunches with reactions like, "Are you suggesting I could be bribed for a $20 lunch?"  I had two responses:  1)  How expensive a lunch would it take?  and 2) If $20 is trivial, then why don't you pay for the lunch yourself?   But I got the point.  Other people were unethical, but even hinting they might be was insulting.

Most people, particularly those who have dressed themselves in society's symbols of legitimacy, rarely recognize when they do something wrong. Tom Delay, for example, is still protesting his innocence.  If Gamble reads this, while he might acknowledge some of the points theoretically, he'd probably say that, practically, he'd made the right decision and he'd do it again.  And that's why I'm covering this in such detail.  He shouldn't do something like this again.  And if he does, it won't be out of ignorance.


Broader Issues

1.  The University of Alaska is a large public organization with a budget over $1 billion.  The FY2012 operating budget alone is $884,983.300.  The capital budget is another $212,525,500.  (To put this in context, the Governor's proposed total operating budget for the State of Alaska is $5.45 billion.  To be fair here, only $350 million of the UA budget comes from the State.  But the total operating budget is 1/5 the State's operating budget.)   How the University is run should be of concern to Alaskans.

2.  The University of Alaska is the main institution for higher education in the state of Alaska.  How it operates, its emphases on one approach to education or another, will greatly affect the future of the state.  Nationally, great changes have been going on in higher education as university budgets have almost matched health care for significant increases. Legislators have reacted with calls for more efficiency.  A business metaphor has replaced the idea of education.  Students have been changed into customers and education has become preparation for a job rather than for life.  "How?" is replacing "Why?" as the basic question for college students.  There are legitimate questions about what universities do and how they do it.  But there are also many simplistic answers floating around. 

Facing these changes requires people who both understand education and who understand what parts of traditional education are essential to keep and how to move into the future taking advantage of new technology to make education better, but without making it superficial.  So Alaskans, even those not involved in the University, have a huge stake in what happens in the administration of the University.


Specific Issues - Consequences of Skipping a Search

1.   Credibility of the President's Commitment to Shared Governance

The President, in his November letter announcing the beginning of the search, said the new chancellor should have "an unwavering belief in the efficacy of shared governance."  Either the President

• doesn't have such a belief himself, 
• doesn't understand this the same way it's understood by faculty and staff and students, or 
• didn't want to risk not getting his preferred candidate.  

There was no shared governance in this decision.  Gamble muffed an opportunity to be a University President and instead acted as the University CEO.  Chancellor Case was appointed by the President with no meaningful participation of the UAA community.  Not only did Gamble choose someone against the Faculty Senate's unanimous recommendation, but he did not bother to discuss his reasons why before he made the appointment or why he scrapped any semblance of a search.

When push comes to shove, this new Chancellor will be clearly and unequivocally representing the President in Anchorage rather than representing the UAA community to the President.  This is not shared governance.

2.  Legitimacy

The odor of cronyism floats over this appointment.  Even if Tom Case is the best possible chancellor - which we really can't judge given the lack of other candidates to compare him to - skipping over the process leaves a residue of suspicion and distrust.  Had there been an open process with several candidates, the President may have risked that his preferred candidate was not recommended.  He then would have had to make a decision - either to accept the search committee's recommendation or to still choose his preferred candidate.  Gamble didn't take that gamble.  The odds would have been in his favor.  Usually such a committee identifies acceptable candidates and possibly a preferred candidate.  Had Case made the acceptable list, his legitimacy would have been assured, and this would not have been seen as a possible case of cronyism.  Odds are good this would have happened.

Instead the new Chancellor comes in under a cloud.  And there is antagonism between the faculty and President. 



3.  Communication

The time that a search committee puts into developing criteria for a position is time where people have to articulate their values and their models of education and universities.  There is a lot of give and take, people reveal themselves, and relationships are built.  This would have been a great opportunity for the President, who comes from alien organizational cultures, to have gotten an intimate look at this new culture he now heads.  That opportunity has been lost.

Conclusions

This is a post I wish I didn't have to write, but I feel strongly that if the President continues in this path the relationship between him and the faculty will get more and more strained.  The faculty are in an awkward position.  They don't want to spend their time taking on the President, they'd much rather work cooperatively with the head of the University system to make the university a better place.   But a lot of them think they've been rolled by the President and don't want it to happen again. 



My sense is that while they feel misused and are concerned about the future, they are willing to accept and support Tom Case.  They also have to assess Gamble.  Was this a willful decision to by-pass the process to make sure his Air Force colleague and friend would get the position or simply a cultural blunder?  If the latter, is he willing and capable of respecting this new (for him) culture and concepts like shared governance? Did he know buying this Corvette behind her back was wrong, but did it quick before she could say no? Or is he just not used to having to check with the spouse? And how's he going to behave next time there's a family decision to be made?

This has been a long post because none of the other news media are covering the story, except the UAA student newspaper, Northern Light, and I want to document the complexities of this situation as best as I can for the record.


I expect that Tom Case will be a good Chancellor at UAA.  I worked with him in the College of Business and Public Affairs and respect him as an honorable and sensitive man of considerable ability.

But in a democracy, the ends don't justify the means.  Prisoners get released when the police or courts have violated procedures set up to protect their rights.  The President had more than enough lead time to fill this vacancy properly.  And as one of his first major acts of significance, it behooved him to do it right.  He didn't.  Wednesday he's coming to Anchorage to talk to the UAA faculty.  Whether the future will be rocky or smooth will depend on how that meeting goes.

The university can be a frustrating place because democracy can be frustrating. Democracy allows time for people to have their say and be listened to.  And I myself could point out to ways I would streamline things - but not at the expense of serious shared governance.

One needs to remember, "It's not WHAT you do, but the WAY you do it."

AIFF 2013: Two Fine Films: De Nieuwe Wereld (The New World) and Hank and Asha

This is a continuation of this post on "What Makes A Good Film?"


My 1's (movies that had me walking out of the theater going 'wow!'):

7 Cajas (7 Boxes)

Die Nieuwe Wereld (The New World)

Hank and Asha

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (明天記得愛上我)


All four of these movies pulled me in so completely that I wasn't watching the movie making - all the technical stuff worked to tell the story, not distracted from the story (either because it was bad or so spectacular that it distracted.)

All four, I left the theater with the feeling of having seen a really good film.

Of the four,  I probably was the least swept away at the moment by The New World.  But it wouldn't let go of me.  Scenes kept coming back to me.  When I saw Hank and Asha I walked out pumped.  What a great film.  But then, I wondered was there enough depth?  Was this just a well made, but light romantic comedy?  The New World seemed more important, but I didn't walk out with the same elation.  Was I just being shallow?

At this point, I think they are both very fine movies.  The New World told a complicated story deceptively simply.  It quietly took us on a tour of two people's broken hearts.  We slowly learn about Mirte and Luc and their similar losses that allowed her to reach out to help him. At the same time helping herself.  On the surface though, it almost seems like a documentary about life at the airport's detention area for asylum seekers waiting for the decision whether they can enter Holland or not.  It's so understated.  Even the colors are muted.  One audience member told me his initial reaction was negative because there was no humor.  But the humor was there.  It was just so quiet.  Like a little dab of yellow in a grey-brown world.  For example - people are coming in the door at the end of the hallway where she's just mopped the floor.  She waves her hands at them to stay on the side - these are immigrants who probably don't speak Dutch.  She makes 'chhhhhh...chhhhhh" sounds at them.  An African stares at her as he walks down the hall.  She again goes, "chhhhhhh. . .chhhhhhhhhh."  He smiles and goes, "chhhhhhh. . .chhhhhhhhhh" back to her as though he were learning to say 'hello' in her language.   It's such intimate cross cultural communications that make this movie so powerful.  Two low level people in a political no-man's land at the airport, but not technically in Holland. In another scene, she catches him staring at her and she waves him off and tells him not to look at her.  He comes up to her and in complete innocence says, "I've never seen a white cleaning woman before."

This is a movie where you have to look closely or you'll think nothing is happening, but it's just happening at a lower volume and slower pace than we're used to in US film.  Slight gestures fill the screen with meaning if you're attuned to them.  When they get to the scene where she's washing the glass wall and he dances on the other side along with her motions it's like an explosion in another movie.

We get glimpses behind the scene in this asylum center - the workers making bets on who's lying, the attorneys trying to find ways to mesh the clients' stories with the specifics of the law, the impossible responsibility of determining if someone is telling the truth.  We see the healing relationship between the mother and her young son.     There's the motor bicycle she rides everywhere.  There's so much.  I was only able to see this film once and I know that a second and third viewing would reveal so much more I didn't see.

Actors Bianca Krijgsman and Issaka Sawadogo were superb.   This was, for me, one of the gems of the festival.


And then I saw Hank and Asha.  This is a feel good movie.  It's a video romance between two strangers, played by actors (Mahira Kakkar and Andrew Pastides) loaded with charm.  It's all told in the videos they - two budding film makers - send back and forth to each other between New York and Prague.  There's no nudity, no sex, no violence, just two well adjusted 20 somethings falling into an unexpected friendship that gets to the edge of something more.  Everything worked for me as they shared their lives with each other via video.  There's nothing heavy here, no imminent deportations, though there is appropriate cultural and parental conflict.  The epistolary film, that uses an exchange of videos rather than letters, is itself a comment on what we have lost as we've moved to instant global communication.   Everything worked for me.  The story, the characters (I never thought of the actors as actors it was so real), the way it was all put together seemed so natural.  We were simply eavesdropping as two people opened their video mail from their new found friend across the Atlantic.

The film makers - James Duff and Julia Morrison - were at the festival and I was able to learn more about the film.  You can see my video with them in Anchorage discussing the film here.  Most surprising was that the two actors only met after the filming was done. In fact Mahira did all her video in ten days in Prague before any of Andrew's video was made.  This speaks well to the scripting, the acting, and the editing.

James and Julia said Hank and Asha will be available on Netflix in April and people should put it on their lists now.  This is the kind of film I feel pretty comfortable recommending - it's hard not to like.  We did see this one twice and it held up nicely the second time.  I saw lots of things I'd missed the first time.

Next, two films that were not in competition because they were special selections - invited films, not submissions.  

TSA Fast Lane, Arctic Prof Calls For Arctic Oil Moratorium; 34 Years In Prison On False Testimony - Back In LA

We're back to be with my mom in LA.  We were on the pre-screened list at the airport yesterday so we didn't have to take off our shoes, show our plastic bags, or take off our shoes.  The ADN had an article on this program last December.

TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers, up from Seattle for the occasion, said there are two ways for travelers to join the program. Five U.S. airlines are authorized by TSA to invite selected frequent flyers into PreCheck. Or a person can apply through one of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Trusted Traveler programs like Global Entry.
All five of the select airlines serve Anchorage: Alaska, Delta, American, United and U.S. Airways. Bobbie Egan, spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, said a batch of invitations went out over the weekend by email. If you didn't get one, it won't do any good to call up the airline to complain, she said.
"We don't set the criteria -- the TSA sets the criteria for who's invited to participate," Egan said. "It's a TSA program solely."

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/12/04/2713439/tsa-opens-fast-lane-for-prescreened.html#storylink=cpy

I'm not sure what 'invite' means in this case.  No one told us until we got to the security line and they scanned our boarding pass and told us to go in that lane.  And it's the first time it happened.  Is there a little racial profiling mixed up in this?  Older white male and female?  I'm sure that didn't do any harm.  Or maybe NSA has told TSA that we haven't talked to any terrorists lately.  Who knows?

The LA Times has an interview today with Professor Sergei Medvedev, an Arctic specialist who is calling for an oil moratorium in the Arctic and who Putin called "a moron." [I'm sure Putin used a Russian word.  It would be interesting to know how it translates substantively and emotionally into English.]

"Political science professor Sergei Medvedev, a longtime lover and explorer of the Arctic, drew the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he recently called for international protection of the icy northern region in the face of economic development plans.
Last month, Putin called Medvedev, who teaches at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, "a moron."
The incident prompted a nationwide discussion of the Arctic and coincided with the arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists protesting a Russian oil drilling project in the region.
Medvedev, 46, who anchors popular television shows and studied and worked for 15 years in the West, spoke to The Times last month at the Architecture Museum in downtown Moscow."

LA Times story about man in prison for 34 years, convicted on eye witness testimony.  The witnesses sister has now testified that she told police back then that her sister was lying.  Finally it comes out and judge agrees he was falsely convicted.

Prosecutors had argued that about 12:30 p.m. on April 6, 1979, Register shot Jack Sasson five times in the carport of his West Los Angeles home. Sasson, 78, died three weeks later.
At trial, the physical evidence against Register was scant, court papers said. None of the seven fingerprints found on Sasson's car matched Register's. Police never recovered the murder weapon.
They did seize a pair of pinstriped pants from Register's closet, which had a speck of blood smaller than a pencil eraser. But it was of little value — the blood type, O, matched Sasson and Register.
Instead, the prosecution relied on eyewitness testimony, notably that of Brenda Anderson. Then 19, Anderson said she was at home when she heard gunfire, looked out the window and saw an African American man sprinting from the Sassons' carport, court papers said. She identified him as Register, though Register's girlfriend testified that he was with her at the time of the shooting.
Register was convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Each time he appeared before the parole board, he refused to admit guilt.
"It appears that the only reason that I have been consistently denied parole is because I have maintained my innocence," he once told the board, court papers said.
Register might have remained behind bars, his attorneys said, if not for a stroke of luck. In late 2011, another of Brenda Anderson's sisters, Sheila Vanderkam, found a website that locates convicted felons. "I typed in the name Kash Register out of curiosity," she said in a declaration, "and learned, to my horror, that Mr. Register was still in prison."

Another example of police and prosecutors apparently more interested in convicting somebody than convicting the right person.

I biked down to Venice Beach just before sunset.  

[Feedburner notes: This one seems to have taken about seven hours to be seen on blogrolls. I posted it at 7:28pm and the first hits from blogrolls came at 4:30am the next day.]

While Death Penalty Executions Have Gone Down, Police Still Meting Out Death Penalty On The Streets

California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, has imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in California.

However, the death penalty is being meted out by police officers around the country.  And while convicted murderers and rapists are spared the death penalty, often innocent citizens are not.

2019
Killed By Police* lists 197 people who have been killed by police in the US this year (and we're only in the middle of March.)

Death Penalty Info lists 3 people killed so far this year as a result of death penalty executions.

2018
The Root tells us 2165 people were killed by police in 2018.
Mapping Police Violence puts the number at 2166 people killed by police in 2018.  They also have a lot of related information and graphics - including comparisons between cities, crime rates, and other factors which show huge differences.
The Washington Post lists only 998 people killed by police in 2018.   (Including 7 in Alaska.)  These are only people shot and killed by police.  The others include all deaths caused by police.

Death Penalty Info lists 25 people dying by state sanctioned death penalty executions in 2018.  (Of that number, 11 are identified as Black or Latino.  13 (more than half) were in Texas.)

	Killed By Police	Killed By Execution
2018	2166	25
2019	197	3

When police shoot and kill 'suspects' - the victim gets no  presumption of innocence, no trial, no jury. No appeal.  And police shooters almost never get prosecuted, let alone convicted.


OK.  Let's acknowledge that police have a difficult job.  They meet most of their 'customers' at some of the worst times in their lives.  They're asked to intervene in crimes being committed, often, by people with guns and other weapons.  They have to make fast decisions.   Most of us don't want to do these jobs.

Chart from PEW Research

Does It Have To Be This Way?

But when we look at the numbers, only a relatively small percent (less than 1/3) of police officers ever report firing their gun while on duty!  From the  Pew Research article (and reflected in the chart):

"To start, male officers, white officers, those working in larger cities and those who are military veterans are more likely than female officers, racial and ethnic minorities, those in smaller communities and non-veterans to have ever fired their service weapon while on duty. Each relationship is significant after controlling for other factors that could be associated with firing a service weapon." 

The article points out that there is no cause and effect relationship proven between these characteristics.

My main point for using the data is to show that the vast majority of police NEVER even fire their guns in the line of duty.

In a 2000 Associated Press article we get this quote:

"Well over 95 percent never shoot their weapons here," said New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

But we don't know if that's because they aren't ever in situations where they apprehend armed suspects or because they handle those situations differently from officers who do shoot.  (Well maybe someone does, but this study didn't make any such claims.)

But the data do suggest that shooting suspects is NOT necessary in most cases.

Are there ways to reduce the number of police caused deaths?

I would also suggest that officers who do kill suspects are also victims of systems that make that option more likely.  They see innumerable shootings on television, in movies, and in video games they participate in the shootings.  They are nearly all given guns, which makes shooting (rather than other options, like talking, like waiting, like non-lethal weapons) an easy option.  (We tend to use the tools we have to solve most problems.**)  They don't necessarily get adequate training for dealing with the mentally ill.  Internalized racism (again, television and movies play a big part here) will make many if not most officers more likely to assume the worst for suspects of color.  (And officers of color are also the victims of internalized racism so when they are the shooters it's not proof that racism wasn't involved.)

Use of Force Project offers specific systemic actions that reduce deaths by police.  (In this list the wording is reversed - what departments DON"T do that they should.  There's a lot of info on this site, including a long list of police departments (including Anchorage) and which of these these standards they meet.)

1. "Failing to require officers to de-escalate situations, where possible, by communicating with subjects, maintaining distance, and otherwise eliminating the need to use force
2. Allowing officers to choke or strangle civilians, in many cases where less lethal force could be used instead, resulting in the unnecessary death or serious injury of civilians
3. Failing to require officers to intervene and stop excessive force used by other officers and report these incidents immediately to a supervisor 
4. Failing to restrict officers from shooting at moving vehicles, which is regarded as a particularly dangerous and ineffective tactic
5. Failing to develop a Force Continuum that limits the types of force and/or weapons that can be used to respond to specific types of resistance
6. Failing to require officers to exhaust all other reasonable means before resorting to deadly force
7. Failing to require officers to give a verbal warning, when possible, before shooting at a civilian
8. Failing to require officers to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against civilians"

I think it's important as fewer Americans die because of death penalty executions, to remember that in essence, police who kill suspects are, de facto, applying the death penalty.


Notes:

*Killed By Police lists a cumulative number for 2019 (197), but they don't for 2018.  Each page is a month, and so I looked for other sources rather than try to count each specific death they list.  The sources I used for 2018 did not have (at least I couldn't find) 2019 data.

**I learned about The Law of The Instrument long ago in a research methodology book  It goes something like this:  If you give a a child a hammer, it will find that most things need to be pounded.

International Ombuds Day Finds 3 Alaskan Ombuds At Loussac

My first book chapter was on the Alaska State and Anchorage Municipal Ombudspersons.  And later I did some follow up chapters.  So I have a special place in my heart for people serving in this office.

Basically, an ombudsperson's job is to take complaints about government service, investigate it, and make recommendations.  An honorable job and the people who carry out these jobs well are on my hero list.

After dropping off a book due at the Loussac library today, I saw the big ombudsman signs and learned it was International Ombudsman Day (2nd Thursday of October for those looking ahead to next year.)  From the International Ombudsman Association website:

"On Thursday, 10 October 2019, IOA invites you to participate in National Ombuds Day. This is the second celebration of a profession that has existed for centuries, yet remains relatively unknown and underutilized.
This Year’s Theme Is
Ombuds: Unusual Name. Important Service.
Ombuds Day serves as an additional opportunity to educate and raise awareness among the public about the history and practices of the ombuds profession including the various ombuds models, the roles they play, the services they offer and the value provided."

Here's Anchorage Municipal Ombudsman Darrel Hess and his  Deputy May Ramirez-Xiong today.

I also got to talk to the State Ombudsperson, Kate Burkhart, who works out of Juneau, but Anchorage also has a state ombuds office as well.  (Note:  She was standing in front of the Long Term Care Ombudsman sign, so, to avoid confusion, I blocked out some of the writing on that sign.)

Also, there was Kathryn Curry, Deputy Long Term Care Ombudsman, of the State's Long Term Care Ombudsperson.  That's a very specialized office that's mandated by Federal Law Older Americans Act.  They specialize, as the name suggests, in investigating complaints about long term care facilities.

And maybe I'll find some time to write about the next installments of the Project Innocence and Pebble Mine classes I attended before the library.

[There's always a non-sexist way to say something.  Ombudsman is the original Swedish word that comes from Old Norse.  The ombuds community discusses different ways to actually say it in non-sexist ways.  My preferences are ombuds and ombudsperson.  I suspect the names above are in statute and people rather not go through the process of changing it.]

Trying to Watch "Fair Game" with an Open Mind

[This is a long post.  Most of you won't read it all.  It's long though, because it shows step-by-step how a rightwing website neutralizes truth, in this case how they make bogus claims against the movie Fair Game - the name is so apt - to neutralize some of the most shocking known behavior of the Bush Administration.  This is probably longer than it need be, but finding the truth, despite what people say, doesn't come in bumper-sticker brevity.]


We saw the movie Fair Game last week. It tells a story* about the active undercover CIA Agent Valerie Plame who was outed by the White House in July 2003.  Her husband, former US Ambassador Joe Wilson, had been hired to determine if Niger had really supplied yellow-cake uranium to the Iraqi government to be delivered in those now infamous aluminum tubes.  (*I think we have to stop using "the" story for anything, because even without the ideological split in the US, it is ever clearer that different people relate different stories about the same events)

Contributing to my state of mind, was the fact I had just heard an NPR story called the The Great Textbook Wars that afternoon.  From NPR:

In 1974, Kanawha County, West Virginia was the first battleground in the American culture wars. Controversy erupted over newly-adopted school textbooks. School buildings were hit by dynamite and Molotov cocktails, buses were riddled with... [The full article is at WNYC]

This piece had interviews with the people who began the boycott against the new textbooks which included a more modern and diverse group of authors and ideas than the previous texts had.  A couple of people cited their 1974 protest as the beginning of the Tea Party movement.  From the piece I gathered that the protesters were generally not well educated, their world view was dominated by religion, and they were not happy about the changes in their lives being brought about by integration - which was reflected in the textbook changes.  We also heard from teachers who said they needed a curriculum which better reflected their students, that discussed more than just dead white males in literature and history and science.  BUT, it was also clear that the catalyst for the protesters was a feeling of being disrespected.  They felt these changes were being forced on them without any input from them and they weren't going to take it any more.  Perhaps they couldn't stop the national civil rights legislation of the 60s, but they could stop their local schools from imposing new texts which raised questions they didn't want their kids exposed to.

Yikes, I'm trying to explain the link between textbook wars and Fair Game without making this too lengthy.  Much of this has been sitting for a week as I let the ideas naturally rise.  I don't think I used enough yeast.  But I need to get this done.  Let's just say the textbook wars reminded me once again that people do things for reasons and when people get pushed too far, emotion blocks out any chance for reason to triumph.

Even without the textbook story in my head, my tendency is to play the devil's advocate and think about other interpretations of the story.  I can't watch anything - even something I agree with - without thinking about how someone with a different perspective would react.  

As I watched Fair Game, with the radio show fresh in my mind, I could hear the Tea Party supporters of Joe Miller shouting out "Lies, Lies!" throughout the movie.  I did wonder what they would have said about a Joe Wilson talk to college students where he warned about government becoming a tyranny and how it would get worse if they didn't pay attention and stand up and protest.

We're in a period of American history - one that is not unique in this respect - where 'truth' is limited to facts that don't challenge 'my' world view.  This affects those on all points of the political spectrum, though some are more prone to be ruled by raw emotion rather than hard facts and logic.  The key is to find a path which blends both the passion that stirs us to do things with the rationality that gets us to do them effectively.  We can't let emotion blind us to the 'truth.'

In Fair Game's portrayal of the Valerie Plame case, even recognizing that Hollywood leaves out much of the story and enhances it for dramatic effect (so do politicians and all of us, of course), a few facts can't be disputed.

1. President George W Bush used evidence - the aluminum tubes and the non-existent yellow-cake uranium - to justify going to war with Iraq, even though the CIA was telling them couldn't be true.  In one scene Scooter Libby badgers a CIA analyst - Are you 100% sure?  99% sure?  96% sure?  If you aren't 95% sure, are you willing to risk our security?  
   
   Even if we accept the notion that the White House was convinced this was true - and not simply a plausible ploy for getting the American public to go along - it turns out later that they were, in fact, wrong.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  .
   
   
2. The White House exposed the identity of an active undercover CIA agent with open projects - and informants in different parts of the world whose lives were jeopardized and possibly lost because of the outing.  Besides being a federal crime, this also forced the resignation of an experienced agent with active, needed knowledge, and endangered CIA contacts around the world.  While the White House ran a misinformation campaign that suggested Plame was a third rate agent who didn't do anything, they do the same sort of campaign with anyone who is in their way - ie the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry.
    
3. Scooter Libby was tried and convicted.  And his sentence was commuted by the White House
   

These 'truths' are all on the record.  You can quibble about different details of the movie - it had 90 minutes or so to present its narrative - these three things are indisputable..


Or so I thought.  While prepping this, I ran across the blog Newsbusters - a right wing blog set up to debunk liberal lies - which reviewed the movie Fair Game


Here's what Newsbusters tells us about NewsBusters.org

Welcome to NewsBusters, a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.
In August of 2005, with the assistance of Matthew Sheffield of Dialog New Media, the MRC launched the NewsBusters blog to provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting. [emphasis added.]

You can read the Wikipedia post on NewsBusters which emphasizes the ideological stance (and was itself attacked by Newsbusters.)   Even if you read NewsBusters itself, it is clear  that this is a site set up to promote conservative Republican causes first, and not to expose the truth.

The trend I see is this:

1. Attack the opponent - lying is totally within the rules
2. If your opponent fights back you have a couple of choices
1.  Attack again
2.  Change the subject
3.  Say that nobody can be trusted - raise questions about the honest folks so the dishonest folks look equal.  This is what they mean by 'neutralizing'.

The point is to totally sully the water so that any sort of authentic discussion is impossible.  Then the loudest and most persistent wins.

This works to the advantage of the conservatives because their reserve of funding is deeper.  Sure, liberals can raise a lot of money too, but in part that's because the money people want everyone - people who agree with them and those who don't - to be indebted to them.  They bet on all the horses - the only sure way to win no matter who's in office.  The Republicans have also just done a much better job of spreading their message.

I go through all this because I'm pretty sure that Fair Game is reasonably accurate on the basics if not every cinematic detail.  Newsbusters attacks Fair Game's validity by making bogus claims on minor issues and distracting the reader from the really serious issues the movie raised.  Neutralizing them as Newsbusters says its goal is.   Few people will check their out-of-context quotes..  This stirs up their partisans and sows seeds of doubt among those who don't know the background and who assume that no one could lie so shamelessly.  In the end, the casual reader goes away thinking, "another biased movie.  You can't believe anyone these days." Neutralization accomplished.  But what if they are telling the truth?  Then the truth has been neutralized and lies are equal to truth.

Look at  Newsbusters' damning conclusions about Fair Game:

1. Liman [the movie's director] is being dishonest in order to push a left-wing agenda.
2. Liman is being dishonest because the factual story is far less interesting than the fictional account released Friday.
3. Liman is completely ignorant of the facts, and too lazy to do even a little research.

The message is:  it's all lies, there's nothing there, they're stupid and lazy.

How did they reach these conclusions?  They made them up.  They took several ideas from the movie and declared them to be false with the help of out-of-context quotes from the Robb-Silbermann Report on WMD's. 

The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein did the legwork in demonstrating just how far from the truth some of the film's central claims are. Chief among them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and other White House officials exerted political pressure on intelligence officials to cherrypick intelligence favorable to claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, not only did Libby do no such thing, but according to the Robb-Silbermann Commission, which investigated the intelligence behind the Iraq war, "The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

What??!!  First, there is no contradiction.  The Robb-Silbermann Report quote does NOT say there was no pressure exerted.  It clearly says that the intelligence officials didn't "skew or alter any of their analytical judgments" because of political pressure that did exist.  

They damn Liman because he didn't read the report:

Weinstein asked "Fair Game" director Doug Liman if he had read the Robb-Silbermann report. He had not.

Liman was the director.  It was his job to take the script (not write the script) and make a movie from it.  The report is 601 pages.  Why should Liman read it?  But I'm sure the author of the book  the movie was based on read the report.  Why do am I sure?  Because the book was written by Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson assisted her.  They had a huge stake in knowing every detail of this report and Wilson testified before the commission and is cited in the report. And probably the script-writer read a lot more of it than did anyone associated directly with the Newsbusters article.


Then Newsbusters proceeds with more obfuscation.

But other blatant falsehoods pervade the film that could be disproven with a simple Google search. For instance, it is near-common knowledge by now - except among politically interested Bush-bashers - that neither Libby nor then-White House advisor Karl Rove leaked Wilson's wife's name to the press. In fact, State Department official Richard Armitage dropped the name to the late columnist Robert Novak, setting off a political firestorm.
But according to Weinstein,

You wouldn’t know this by watching Liman’s “Fair Game,” since Armitage is nowhere to be found — except in script at the very end. The narrative that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby were nefarious behind-the-scenes players intent on destroying innocent reputations while pushing the nation into war on false pretenses fits too nicely into Liman and Hollywood’s leftwing vision. You can’t, after all, let facts spoil a cinematic anti-Bush diatribe.

OK,  neither Rove nor Libby contacted the media and directly told them. And the movie doesn't say they did. But it is also 'near-common knowledge' that Armitage worked closely with them both and would never have leaked the information exposing the identity of an active undercover CIA agent on his own, without their assent.   Newsbusters conveniently fails to mention that Libby was convicted and President Bush commuted his sentence because of his actions portrayed in this movie.  Here's what Fox News wrote (yes, that Fox News) about the conviction:

I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby Guilty on Four of Five Counts in CIA Leak Trial

Libby was accused of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned about Valerie Plame's identity and whom he told. Plame is the CIA employee whose husband. Amb. Joe Wilson, was sent to Niger by the agency to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium.

The Newsbusters article continues with more twisted truth:

According to Weinstein, the fictional Wilson "suggests his report to the CIA definitively debunked the Iraq-Niger claim." In fact, Bush's statement was accurate: British intelligence had discovered just that. A bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2004 that Wilson's report "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium” and "did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal."

Wait, wait, wait.  The movie didn't dispute that the British reported this.  But the movie said that the British report was wrong.  Which it was. 

Here's the paragraph from the  Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq the first quote is lifted from:

When the former ambassador [Joe Wilson] spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respects. First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and, specifically, as refuting both the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report described how the structure of Niger's uranium mines would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Niger to sell uranium to rouge [sic] nations, and noted that Nigerien officials denied knowledge of any deals to sell uranium to any rogue states, but did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium. 

The movie didn't deny the possibility that Iraq might have approached Niger for uranium, only that if they did, Niger never sold or gave them any.  And even if this allegation about the movie were true, it's a relatively minor point compared to the ones I listed above. It's like disputing that the man had dirty fingernails and skipping the fact that he murdered someone. 

The second quote is also shown to NOT support Newsbusters contention:

(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             
(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             
(                )                                                              PARAGRAPH DELETED                                                             

(U) Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

The three paragraphs before this conclusion are deleted, so we have to go from the little that is there.  But it is clear if you read this, that analysts' assessments weren't changed because they already believed there was no uranium deal between Niger and Iraq.  His report "lent more credibility to the original" CIA reports.  The only way that could be true is if those reports said the deal didn't take place.  And the quote clearly says the INR didn't think Niger would sell the uranium to Iraq.

So everything in these two quotes is consistent with what was in the movie.  But not too many Newsbusters readers are likely to go to the original source to check on a narrative they already want to believe.

This attack on the Fair Game, in my mind, is the same as claiming Obama is a Kenyan citizen and a Muslim.  The point is to raise questions about clear, factual events that you don't want people to believe.  To destroy the good name and character of people who oppose you.  To raise questions about their message.  What don't the Newsbusters folks want people to believe?

1.  People close to Karl Rove and VP Cheney, people who would not have acted without Rove's and probably VP Cheney's approval (of course it would be given with plausible deniability) exposed an active CIA agent, a serious violation of the law and breach of US Security.  An action that the conservatives would have lynched a Democratic White House had it done the same thing. 

2.  That there was clear evidence that there was no uranium deal between Niger and Iraq and the aluminum tubes were not for rockets to launch nuclear weapons, yet President GW Bush used this as a key justification for going to war against Iraq.  In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell knew it was false and did not mention the Niger uranium in his speech to the United Nations. (See the Robb-Silbermann report, footnote 210 on page 213 - and no, I didn't read the whole report either, I just know how to use 'search.')

3.  The attack on Valerie Plame clearly came from the White House, most probably Rove and Cheney were involved, and was in retaliation for Plame's husband publicly refuting the lies the White House was using to justify going to war against Iraq.

4.  Scooter Libby was convicted - presumably as the fall guy to protect Rove and probably Cheney - and then his sentence was commuted by President Bush.

The point of this post is NOT to have a pissing match over facts with people who don't care about seeking out truth.  You can't win a game like that against people who have unlimited resources and no shame.  The point is to illustrate where we are in the US today - nearing a dark age when truth is suppressed ruthlessly and the common good is trashed for private gain. Over and over again.  In every sector from religion to oil to banking, and yes, even in academia. 

The attack on the movie attempts to make readers think the movie is total fiction, but it doesn't acknowledge or refute these facts I've outlined that the movie clearly presents. Facts that should raise a hue and cry from anyone who believes our leaders should obey the law, be fiscally responsible, and that human life is sacred and should not be sacrificed needlessly. (The war in Iraq has killed about 100,000 Iraqi civilians.)

But we shouldn't  be surprised they would attack the movie.  If  Rove and Cheney's people were willing to expose an active undercover CIA agent in retaliation for her husband telling the truth, there's probably little they wouldn't do to defeat their perceived enemies.  Newsbusters behavior here isn't that different from what the movie is about - attack the messenger to suppress the truth. 

Their tactics to replace 'truth' with their own version of reality is working.  People who oppose them are attacked and have to 'prove' their innocence (a traditional American value, right?) and so much mud is thrown that most people throw up their hands and say, "They're all corrupt."  And that's a victory for the corrupt.  Because their corruption isn't as problematic if the voters think that the honest folks are corrupt too.

And lots of writers think twice before posting on something like this out of fear they will be attacked.  This blog is off-the-radar enough I don't think I have to worry.   I'm not pointing out the inconsistencies because I think anyone will change their mind.  I'm doing it to illustrate how public discourse has been horribly polluted so that truth becomes totally indistinguishable - for many - from fiction. 

Yes, Valerie Plame was declared by Karl Rove to be "Fair Game" for this sort of nasty, democracy destroying attack.  But Plame, thanks to her husband, didn't fold.  She did what President Obama needs to do.  They fought back.  So, put Fair Game on your movie list.