Arizona home sales way down

Despite new home builders offering unprecedented incentives, new home sales in Arizona are dismal. 2007 year-to-date sales (through July) were 33,510, compared to 41,835 for the same time period in 2006 and 68,235 for the same period in 2005. And this is while inventories and foreclosures are climbing.

Inside the CIA's secret prisons

Jane Mayer has a story in the August 13, 2007 issue of The New Yorker which describes practices in the CIA's secret prisons, whose existence was recently admitted by the president. Some excerpts:

[Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.
...
The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so “high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has confined, at one point or another, since September 11th. The program has been extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the nomenclature of the intelligence world. By design, there has been virtually no access for outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security. The Justice Department argued this point explicitly last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the government said, had to be prohibited from access to a lawyer specifically because he might describe the “alternative interrogation methods” that the agency had used when questioning him. These methods amounted to a state secret, the government argued, and disclosure of them could “reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.)
...
Finally, last year, Red Cross officials were allowed to interview fifteen detainees, after they had been transferred to Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has been kept from the public. The committee believes that its continued access to prisoners worldwide is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore it addresses violations privately with the authorities directly responsible for prisoner treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”

The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and officials at the congressional intelligence-oversight committees would not even acknowledge the existence of the report. Among the few people who are believed to have seen it are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of the Senate and House intelligence-oversight committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.

Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in this case. Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

...

A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the agency’s detention and interrogation policies, said he worried that, if the full story of the C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel could face criminal prosecution. Within the agency, he said, there is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution” for the interrogation program. If congressional hearings begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. officers have taken out professional liability insurance, to help with potential legal fees.

...

The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

...

According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

...
A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

...

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

...

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

...

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

...

Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.

...

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.”

I recommend reading the whole article.

Congress approves expansion of presidential wiretapping powers

Both houses of Congress have passed a bill that updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow warrantless wiretapping when at least one party is a foreigner, without any requirement that the foreigner be suspected of having connections to terrorists. Wiretaps in such cases do not require approval of the FISA court, only of the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. As Tim Lee at Technology Liberation Front observes:

So let me get this straight: the White House says “we think we should be able to eavesdrop on virtually any domestic-to-foreign phone call without court oversight, based on the say-so of one of the president’s subordinates.” And the Democrats response was “Hell no! Warrantless spying should require the say-so of two of the president’s subordinates!”

Arizona's Congressmen voted along party lines except for Harry Mitchell, who sided with the Republicans in favor of the bill, which provides for this expansion of powers for the next six months. (UPDATE, August 8, 2007: Actually, McCain didn't vote on this bill at all, it's another of his no-shows.)

Kudos to Pastor, Grijalva, and Giffords for voting against this.

(Hat tip to Technology Liberation Front and Stranger Fruit.)

UPDATE (August 7, 2007): Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has more on how this bill has gutted any oversight of what the Executive branch is doing.

Arizona doctors who question evolution

Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity is an organization of Darwin-denying doctors being touted by the Discovery Institute as evidence of growing dissent against evolution. Those on their membership list in Arizona:

Dr. Richard D. Friedman, Internal Medicine, Chandler, Arizona
Dr. Joseph M. Kezele, Emergency Medicine, Cave Creek, Arizona
Dr. William H. Noland, Neurology, Tucson, Arizona
Dr. Joel T. Rohrbough, Orthopaedic Surgery, Flagstaff, Arizona
Dr. Allan T. Sawyer, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Glendale, Arizona

Personally, given the new developments in biological science and medicine that are discovered as a result of evolutionary science, I would not want to use a doctor who denies evolution.

Jarrett Maupin Sr. and Jr. controversies

Jarrett Maupin II, protege of Al Sharpton, wants to be mayor of Phoenix, but unfortunately for his campaign, incumbent mayor Phil Gordon's challenges to his ballot petitions have disqualified enough signatures to get him off the ballot. It seems that Maupin hired individuals with felony convictions to collect signatures, and a majority of his signatures were from people not registered to vote, leaving him 91 signatures short. Maupin said he was "outraged" by Gordon's challenge of his petition and insisted that he would be on the ballot.

Maupin got press by showing up at the mayor's office with a voter registration form, stating that Gordon is a Democrat in name only and should switch his registration to Republican. Ironically, Maupin was head of the Young Republicans at Brophy College Preparatory (though this was before he was of legal voting age).

I also just came across a news report from 2005, regarding Maupin's father:

A car carrying the Rev. Al Sharpton led sheriff's deputies on a nine-mile chase at speeds up to 110 mph before state troopers stopped the vehicle and arrested the driver, authorities said.
Chief Deputy Charles Sullins said driver Jarrett B. Maupin, 43, was rushing Sharpton to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport after Sharpton visited anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Sunday at her camp outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford.
Because the 2005 Lincoln was rented to Maupin, of Phoenix, sheriff's deputies impounded the car. Maupin posted a $1,000 bond on charges of evading arrest with a vehicle and reckless driving, authorities said.
The car carrying Sharpton and two other passengers was clocked doing 110 mph in a 65 mph zone on the interstate south of Dallas, Sullins said.
He said the driver ignored deputies' attempts to stop it and weaved in and out of traffic before state troopers were able to get in front of the car.

Maupin Jr. was also present in the vehicle. Sharpton denied the allegations, saying that he was not part of any police chase. He declined an offer from the police to drive him to the airport, and began walking down the road, accepting a ride from a passing vehicle.

In 2005, Maupin Jr. ran for Phoenix City Council but was defeated by incumbent Michael Johnson. In 2006, he was elected to the Phoenix Union High School District Board for a four-year term.

Maupin, who attended but did not graduate from my alma mater, Brophy College Preparatory (he transferred to St. Mary's after making accusations of racial harassment), was profiled in Phoenix's New Times regarding his politics in an article titled "Kid Sharpton."

UPDATE (April 28, 2009): Rev. Jarrett Maupin Jr. has resigned from the Phoenix Union High School District Board as part of a plea agreement in U.S. District Court after being arrested for giving false information to the FBI. In exchange for his plea, he will not be prosecuted for other crimes, for which he is paying restitution to victims.

I hope this means the end of his political career.

UPDATE (July 9, 2016): It came out in 2015 that the false statements Maupin made were false allegations against Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, accusing him of being a child molester. Maupin claimed he had seen pictures and video, but the charges had been completely fabricated by Gregory Coleman, an aide to City Councilman Michael Nowakowski, as a test of Maupin's ethics. Maupin failed (though I would argue that the same is true of Coleman).

Maupin was unapologetic for his fabrications and saw himself as the victim of Coleman:

Maupin told 12 News’ Halloran that Coleman came to him with the information about Gordon and that he simply reported it to authorities. It was, he tells her, a mistake, one for which he's sorry.

“I'm not guilty of anything more than Martha Stewart or any number of people making a false statement to a federal entity,” he told her. “And most of us probably do that on our income taxes every year. I think the difference is they had the ability to attempt to politically lynch me. And I am a survivor of an attempted political lynching.”

Arizona's #7 for per-capita preforeclosures

Arizona is the #7 state for per-capita preforeclosures:

TOP 10 PREFORECLOSURE STATES
State	Filings	Per Capita
Nevada	19,044	2.55 percent
Florida	111,250	1.76 percent
Colorado	24,045	1.49 percent
Illinois	52,984	1.35 percent
New Jersey	37,250	1.22 percent
California	132,101	1.15 percent
Arizona	20,669	1.09 percent
Utah	5,773	0.90 percent
Texas	46,595	0.81 percent
Georgia	19,382	0.75 percent

SOURCE: Foreclosures.com

I'm not sure what the timeframe is for this data, but it looks like the last twelve months.

Phony faith healer is top-paid CEO of a religious charity

Charity Navigator has issued a report on salaries of CEOs of charities for 2007. While religious charities have the lowest average CEO compensation of any category (educational charities have the highest), at the top of the religion list is Peter Popoff Ministries, which pays Peter Popoff an annual salary of $628,732. His wife Elizabeth Popoff gets another $203,029.

Not bad for a phony faith healer who was exposed as a fake on the Tonight Show by James Randi two decades ago.

Abolish the CIA

I'm currently reading Pulitzer Prize winning author Tim Weiner's 20-years-in-the-making history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2007, Doubleday). All of Weiner's facts are sourced and on-the-record, including numerous recently declassified sources (some of which the government is attempting to re-classify).

This review of the book by Chalmers Johnson, a former outside consultant for the CIA, does a good job of pointing out some of the highlights and arguing at the conclusion for the abolition of the CIA and letting the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research fill in for the foreign intelligence function.

Weiner's book points out how the CIA has been mismanaged since its creation from the ashes of the Office of Strategic Services, failing to come up with accurate information about major events of significance and leaving a wake of damage from failed covert ops designed to stop the spread of communism even where there was none. And it has regularly deceived presidents, massaged or fabricated intelligence information, and violated the laws of the United States. Johnson writes:

Nothing has done more to undercut the reputation of the United States than the CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of Iran, Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of the Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths from these armed assaults run into the millions. After 9/11, President Bush asked "Why do they hate us?" From Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would be, "Who does not?"

This paragraph understates the case--Johnson goes on to describe how the CIA provided funding for Japanese and Italian politicians. Weiner's book observes that the CIA helped a convicted war criminal become prime minister of Japan in 1957 and bribed the leading officials of the Liberal Democratic Party, which it helped maintain in power until the 1990s. CIA broadcasts from Radio Free Europe called for uprisings. To their surprise, former Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the Communist Party, announced on state radio a break with Russia, and within days formed a new coalition government in October 1956, but CIA Director Allen Dulles rejected him because he had been a communist and RFE attacked him. RFE broadcasts as much as promised U.S. assistance to Hungarian rebels, only to leave them to die on their own in November 1956 when the Soviets crushed the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people were killed and thousands shipped off to Siberia. Dulles lied to Eisenhower about the content of the broadcasts, transcripts of which only became available in English in 1996, and claimed the U.S. had done nothing to encourage the Hungarians.

I've still got much to read in the book (I'm only up to 1958), but so far it is eye-opening and appalling.

UPDATE (August 11, 2007): The CIA has issued a press release taking issue with Weiner's book for its bias.

UPDATE (December 16, 2009): The CIA has published a review critiquing the accuracy and reliability of Weiner's book.

Did Cheney send Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft's hospital room?

The New York Times editorialized that vice president Dick Cheney was the person who sent then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and chief of staff Andrew Card to the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft to try to get him to reauthorize the warrantless wiretapping program that the acting Attorney General James Comey and many Department of Justice staff (including Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller) threatened to resign over.

Larry King asked Cheney about it, and his response is that he had no recollection of such an event, and besides, he didn't read the New York Times editorial. Sounds like a lie to me, and Larry King seems to suggest he thinks so as well.

Talking Points Memo thinks they've identified a Cheney "tell." (And no, it's not just that his lips are moving...)

Words Fail Me...

July, 2007, saw 2503 Notices of Trustee's Sales in Maricopa County - yet another record.