Seeing the World From Ted Stevens' View

The first amendment to the US Constitition, part of what's known as the Bill of Rights reads as follows:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Alaska's senior US Senator, and the senior Republican in the US Senate, Ted Stevens is currently under investigation by the FBI. Last week he met with the editorial staff of the Anchorage Daily News. They taped the session. Here is the last part where he gives his opinion of the ADN.

Stevens_4 imported by AKRaven



[for the other interview segments go here you'll see in the center column the choice of audio links in the picture.]




Perhaps the Senator and the editors agree on the role of the media, perhaps not, but they certainly have different views of whether the ADN is playing its role correctly.

We can hear in the tape the Senator clearly feels put upon and betrayed by the media.

You've been hanging me weekly.
Your guys, they taunt me.
They taunt me with questions no respectable reporter would ask a Senator if it's already said I'm not going to answer questions.

Based on what the ADN has written lately, they believe it is their job to report on the conduct of Senator Stevens, and that they have a responsibility to probe to find out why the FBI searched Stevens' home in Girdwood recently.

So does Stevens know he's got something to hide and he's just being belligerent to the editors when they ask him questions he doesn't want to talk about? Or does he believe that he's being hounded by the ADN and the FBI for no good reason other than being a good Senator who has done what he was elected to do?


The New York Times had an interesting story today about the Norfolk Four. It's about people who confess to crimes they haven't committed. The article argues that what the prosecutor told the jury in one of these cases

"People just do not confess,” Hansen told jurors in Tice’s second trial, “to something of this magnitude, this heinous, this vicious, without having participated in it. It’s just not natural; it’s just not reasonable.”

That is certainly the conventional wisdom.

In fact, the article says there are at least 49 cases where DNA or a later confession by someone else has freed people who confessed.

Deskovic, like many false confessors, said he believed his life was in danger and that his interrogation wouldn’t stop unless he told the police what they wanted to hear.

Nevertheless, studies of proved false confessions suggest a number of recurring markers including actual violence, threats of violence, threats of harsh sentences like execution and extreme duress brought about by isolation, sleeplessness and lengthy, high-pressure interrogation. Police interrogation is designed to be stressful and disorienting and to keep the suspect off-balance. Guilt is frequently presumed. Police may legally pressure suspects using fabricated evidence, phony witnesses and lies about DNA or polygraph results.

In some cases, people are so worn down physically and psychologically that they actually come to believe they might have committed the crime.

But he said in an interview (and in an affidavit) that Ford treated him like a criminal from the outset, poking him in the chest, yelling in his face, calling him a liar and telling him, falsely, that he’d failed a polygraph test and that a witness saw him go into the apartment. The police got him to “second-guess” his memory, Williams said. “They wear you down to the point that you’re exhausted. I just wanted the questioning to end.”

If people can believe, even for a short time, that they are guilty of crimes they haven't committed, surely it's easy to believe someone can believe he's innocent of crimes he has committed. Stevens has been threatened with harsh punishment, treated like a criminal from the outset by some, yelled at in his face. And I'm sure the 83 year old Senator often feels worn down to the point that he's exhausted. That he just wants the questioning to end.


Clearly, a US Senator who has fought for years to raise funds for campaigns, to steer money into his young state that was sorely lacking in infratstructure, and to generally fight for his constituents, will understandably lose patience with reporters who don't understand that sometimes you have to make compromises to get things done. You can't make an omelette without breaking an egg.

And reporters taking their first amendment right to a free press seriously, see their role as asking the hard questions about the Senator's behavior and the alleged favors he might have passed on to financial supporters, friends, and relatives.

In fact, as I listen to the tape, the editor sounds almost timid as he addresses the Senator who is anything but timid.

This conflict isn't new.

"Legal Foundations of Press Freedom in the United States" an essay on a US State Department website, by Jane E. Kirtley, Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, includes the following early history of press freedom in North America.

In 1734, John Peter Zenger, a New York printer, was charged with seditious libel for having printed anonymous criticism of the colonial governor general in his newspaper, the Weekly Journal. After spending nearly one year in jail awaiting trial, he was acquitted by a jury who refused to follow the judge's instructions and convict him. Zenger's lawyer, a retired attorney from Philadelphia named Andrew Hamilton, convinced the jury that no man should be subject to criminal penalties simply for criticizing the government, especially when the facts he reported were true -- resulting in one of the earliest examples of "jury nullification" in what was to become the United States.

Backyard Bird Fest

There were so many birds in the backyard this afternoon. After seeing flashes of yellow and a couple of red breasted nuthatches were flitting right outside the window, I took the Canon Powershot 550 out to see what I could get. It took me about 15 minutes of waiting and shooting to fill my 2 gb sd-card. Downloaded and checked that video and decided to go find the old tripod. Wow, what a difference. Duh. Then as soon as I sat down, the Steller Jay came.

Rabbi Michael Oblath's Debut

We were out of town last spring when he first came to Anchorage, so this was our first chance to see and hear him. First impressions are tricky. What can I say? Reassuring. Experienced, a good clear voice, a comfortable manner. He joked about being nervous at one point, but it certainly didn't show. His sermon - and that word doesn't quite convey it - was a sharing of his understanding of the term "an eye for an eye." It was not, as I understood what he said, the cold retributive sentiment that it's so often interpreted to be. The context is what is important. This is the sentence for someone who falsely accuses another. What the other is accused of, this should be the fate of the false accuser. Or so I understood. I think this is going to be good. He let me take his picture as he was leaving. As usual, no flash.

Political CSI Part 2 - Veracifier Does Don

I posted about Political CSI Thursday and suggested the folks at the Next Hurrah did that sort of thing. But probably what they do is more like real crime investigators do and Veracifier does more like the tv show - simplifies Political CSI for average folk. Thanks to Kodiak Konfidential for this link on Don Young.

Seward City Council Member Gets Paid $50K to Fix Damage He Caused

Someone from Seward passed this newsbit along the other day. Not completely sure about all the details here, but this seems to be the general story.

At Monday's City Council meeting in Seward, Councilman Steve Schafer was asked to recuse himself because he had a conflict of interest in the next item. He then went to sit in the audience. The Council then discussed how Shafer's illegally built road over Japanese Creek had dammed up the creek during last October's flood. When the road eventually washed away, the built up debris and surge damaged the city's levee further down the creek.

The resolution before the Council was to require the bridge builder (Shafer) to pay the $100,000 damage to the levee. Normally, members of the audience can speak to an item at the beginning of the meeting for two minutes or at the end for five minutes. Shafer got his two minutes during the public comment period.

However, another council member proposed the rules be suspended so that Shafer could talk to the Council. Shafer then spoke for nearly an hour during which he argued that the engineering of the levee itself was the problem, not his illegally built road. When the rule suspension was over, the Council voted to split the cost of repairing the levee with Shafer. They then agreed that Shafer would do the repairs himself and the city would reimburse him for half the cost.


Now, there are a couple of issues here that seem strange.

• It would be interesting to know when anyone has been given an hour to address the Council. Did he get so much time because he is on the council?
  
• On the other hand, it would seem there should be some sort of due process that would allow Shafer, or any member of the public, a right to air his side of the case before being fined by the city
• And if I understood this right, after causing $100K damage, he's going to end up getting paid $50K to repair the damage. Why didn't the repair work go out to bid?
• If the problem was with the engineering of the levee, why did the City charge him at all?
  
  
  

Ben's Friends Seem to All Have Money Ties to Dad

Roll Call says that Ben Stevens' new employer got lots of money from Dad.

New Employer of Stevens’ Son Has Reaped Millions in Federal Contracts
By John Stanton
Roll Call Staff
Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007; 3:08 pm

An Alaska-based transportation firm that recently hired the son of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has received more than $300 million in federal contracts over the past six years, many of which came from agencies over which Stevens has direct oversight authority in his current position as ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, federal records show.

Political CSI - The Next Hurrah

On television's CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) investigators gather unlikely evidence and with nifty technology and meticulous computer calculations miraculously find the invisible clues that solve the crime.

Our political situation for many people is like a messy crime scene. We know things have happened, but the evidence is scattered all over the room. Instead of a careful CSI investigation, we get the political spin machines creating the stories that will explain events in their clients' favor.

One of the political blogs I keep going back to is "The Next Hurrah." Blogger Empty Wheel (Journalist Marcy Wheeler) leads a group of smart people, many attorneys, who do political CSI. They take court documents, sometimes articles, and other bits of evidence into their blog-lab and break it down into little pieces to figure out what the missing words are likely to be, to find the inconsistencies, and to recreate the whole event. The commenters add sources of new information, ask questions challenging someone's hypothesis, and articulate other possible interpretations. Yes, there is a clear liberal bias - except for their resident mole Jodi - but the basic bias is for logic, consistency, and sniffing out lies.

An Example of Political CSI: Today, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers released notes, including a log kept by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller about the hospital visit to attorney general Ashcroft by Gonzales and others to get him to approve the surveillance program. You can see the actual document here, thanks to TPM's link.

Below, Empty Wheel is parsing FBI Director Mueller's log of the events to see what is implied by what is and is not said. Readers of the blog are assumed to know who all these people are.

Monday 3/1/04, 1700: Meeting with Comey in his office.

This was actually before the meeting at which Comey and Ashcroft decided not to reauthorize the program, which he said occurred on March 4, the same day Ashcroft was hospitalized. That means two things--Comey was not acting AG when the meeting occurred, and that it happened before the final decision was made. Note that Mueller draws a line after this entry, suggesting some kind of separation between this meeting and subsequent meetings.

Tuesday 3/9/04, 1000: Meeting with Fedarcyk, Pistole, Caproni (and perhaps Wainstein and Gebhardt).

These were then all top FBI people, most with a focus on counter-terrorism--Wainstein is now the AAG in charge of Counter-Terrorism. Fedarcyk, who has since retired, was quoted after Mueller's testimony as suggesting Mueller was "throwing Gonzales under a bus."

Mike Fedarcyk, a retired senior FBI official called Mueller's shot at Gonzales a "jawdropper inside the bureau."

Mueller, who was not in the hospital room, spoke to Ashcroft right after Gonzales left and testified he took notes about the incident. Fedarcyk said that appeared to be insurance against a White House counterattack.

"Usually you take notes to protect yourself. He used them to throw Gonzales under the bus. That's huge," Fedarcyk said.

"This is not partisan politics. It's a bold, strategic, calculated move."

Presumably, this meeting served to finalize the FBI position on what they needed from the program, just before Mueller went and represented the FBI's position at a White House meeting on this.

Tuesday 3/9/04, 1200: Meeting at Card's office, VP, [CIA Deputy Director] McLaughlin, [NSA Director] Hayden, Gonzales and others present.

Note that it appears Meuller was there, but Comey was not, which suggest they thought of Mueller, but not Comey, as a key member of National Security policing.

Unlike on CSI, just a short snippet won't solve the problem. The real work takes much more work. To see how this analysis continues go to The Next Hurrah.

CSI has become an immensely popular television show. That suggests that there is broad public interest in the solving of puzzles through detailed and painstaking testing of different possibilities. So the real question is how do we make the type of political CSI that's in "The Next Hurrah" as interesting to the general public as CSI the television show is?

I'm not sure. In CSI the tv show, there's a crime and the CSI team is trying to find who committed the crime. This is the basic good guy, bad guy story. Easy for the audience to grasp. They don't have to understand all the technical wizardry the lab techs perform. It's like magic where they quickly flash shots of high tech machines and cool microphotos and presto they have solved the case. Since the audience is rooting for the 'good guys' to catch the 'bad guys,' they're willing to accept that all the technology really did prove the guilt. In fact there is a backlash against the show in the law enforcement field because juries now have unrealistic expectations of what the police should be able to prove. Another criticism of CSI listed by Wikipidia is "the level and gratuitousness of graphic violence, images, and sexual content" which surely helps with ratings.

Actually, on a simplistic level, I think Michael Moore and Al Gore perhaps gave us models of how political CSI could be popularized. You need an interesting and/or compelling narrator who will tell the viewers what is happening. You need some jarring contrasts between what people say publicly and what they do privately, and you need good graphics. It also helps for the narrator to expose some personal story. At this point The Next Hurrah is only aimed at wonks. Others probably would wonder whether these folks aren't counting angels, but I think it is more like the CSI team taking a hair from the crime scene and from that hair identifying the killer. The people want to understand and those who do need to hook up with those who know how to communicate those complex linkages to the general public who don't have the time, skill, or patience to pore over these details.

Veco Visuals

Here are a couple of visuals to go along with this morning's lead ADN story. Took these last night walking home from dinner. The building is at the corner of New Seward Highway and 36th Avenue.

FBI investigates science contracts awarded Veco

ARCTIC: $170 million in research contracts coincided with support for polar funding by Sen. Stevens.

By ERIKA BOLSTAD and GREG GORDON
McClatchy Newspapers

Published: August 16, 2007
Last Modified: August 16, 2007 at 10:03 AM

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is investigating the National Science Foundation's award of $170 million in contracts to the oil field services company that oversaw renovations on U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens' home.


The firm, Veco Corp., captured a lucrative five-year NSF contract in 1999 to provide logistics and support for polar research, although it had no previous experience in that field. During the same time period, Veco's top executive managed renovations that doubled the size of the longtime Republican senator's Girdwood home -- the scene of a July 30 FBI raid...

This picture was to show how fire weed can beautify even an ugly parking lot. Only just realized fire weed and a couple of spruce also can screen out a Veco Building almost.

Is Another World Possible? How Do We Know Reality?

It started this morning listening to "Another" radio station - KWMD, 104.5 or 87.7 on the Anchorage FM dial. Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant leading into a story about another alternative radio station - KPFT Houston.

We’re also joined by Mary Thomas. She is the host of the weekly Zydeco music program on KPFT. The bullet that was fired into the station Monday morning narrowly missed her head.

This is coming from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now (Link to KPFT story here)

Then we hear Naomi Klein at the American Sociological Association last week

We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."

In this piece she talks about how the radical capitalists have shut down each budding alternative. In 1989 when the Soviet Union fell

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own...
...if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again.

She identifies a list of situations when alternatives to the American model were either crushed outright (Allende's Chile) or perverted into capitalist copies (Solidarity in Poland).

Citing declassified conversations between Kissinger and Nixon,

Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world. . . The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.

And then a little later on Fresh Air, we hear Eugene Hütz, the leader of Gypsy Punk Group Gogol Bordello. Hütz grew up in Kiev with Gypsy DNA whose family left when Chernobyl blew and eventually made their way to Vermont.

All these stories reinforce that there are possibilities other than the standard model we see on mainstream media. We can have better health care, we can have real citizen involvement in government, we don't have to live lives that that require going into financial debt to Visa to pay for all the necessities of life (that didn't even exist 30 years ago) and time debt to our sleep and families.

We can know the possibilities of better lives if we escape from the ways our ideas are shaped by the fear mongering politicians and corporate media. So go to the links and listen to these ways people are not accepting the status quo.

And Here's the Rain

Video shot about 24 hours after the picture in the previous post of the Ring. So at least this time it was true: "Ring Around the Sun Means Rain Coming Soon."