Eric Umansky

FOIA Eyes Only

FYI:  Here's a piece I just did for Slate about the government's usual response to FOIAs these days (it  involves the middle finger).

'Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda?'

I agree with Marc, Juan Cole, and the Wash Post: the president's plodding and insufficient response to the tsunamis isn't just immoral, it's  stupid.  As Cole puts it:

The worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations.  Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda?

AWOL in Fallujah

My Counterpunch reading days are long gone (as, sadly, is my pony-tail). But amid the huffing and puffing, the newsletter raises a good question this week about Fallujah, where there's  still fighting there, and the town's 200,000 residents still can't come back. Why did the media pack up and go home?

(Courtesy of Cursor)

CACI calling

The Wash Post's biz section mentions inside that the Navy and Marines have awarded  defense contractor CACI a potentially $85 million deal. Left unnmentioned is the fine work done elsewhere by CACI employees: namely, torturing  prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

After the flood: Donate

The Post has a good list of relief organizations, some of them smaller and seemingly more specialized.

UPDATE: Here's a blog that's been set up for relief org info.

Voter registration in Iraq

The Christian Science Monitor says it's lower than expected. (Caveat: This is a guesstimate, since Iraqis are automatically registered via their food ration cards; what the CSM is talking about is the relatively small number of people who don't have a ration cards, or who, say, moved and need new ones.)

Word of the day: 'Glomarize'

Glomarize:
glO/mar/IZ.  transitive verb.  Def: Giving FOIA requestors the finger by refusing to say whether a document even exists.

(Hat tip to the CIA and Steven Aftergood.)

WH's proliferation problems

I've just made it  through the NYT's latest on the AQ Khan nukes network. It was a long, hard slog. The payout:

1) The White House is still giving the finger to IAEA. It's  trying to unseat chief El Baradei (the NYT suggest it's  because of the Iraq war tiff), and more importantly is  refusing to share any intel on Khan's network, despite evidence the network is still alive and still shilling nuke items:  (WH officials say the agency is too leaky):

 

The result is that two separate, disjointed searches are on for other nuclear rogue states - one by Washington, the other by the I.A.E.A. And there is scant communication between the feuding bureaucracies.

 

That lack of communication with the United Nations agency extends to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a loose organization of countries that produce nuclear equipment. It can stop the export of restricted atomic technology to a suspect customer, but it does not report its actions to the I.A.E.A. Moreover, there is no communication between the I.A.E.A. and the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, which seeks to intercept illicit nuclear trade at sea or in the air.

2) Thank god, the U.S.'s investigation  is A+.  Except of course, we wouldn't want to trouble  the Pakistanis, who still won't let American investigators talk to Khan:

"It is an unbelievable story, how this administration has given Pakistan a pass on the single worst case of proliferation in the past half century," said Jack Pritchard, who worked for President Clinton and served as the State Department's special envoy to North Korea until he quit last year, partly in protest over Mr. Bush's Korea policy. "We've given them a pass because of Musharraf's agreement to fight terrorism, and now there is some suggestion that the hunt for Osama is waning. And what have we learned from Khan? Nothing."

The antithesis of intel reform

The recent intel bill  tries  address one of the key problems of our intel services: They've done a bad  job of sharing information.  How well it addresses that issue--by an attempt to consolidate power-- is open to debate.

But there's another major problem facing the CIA and others: a structural bias towards brown-nosing.  Intel agencies have no independence; their heads serve at the pleasure of the president.  And like any employees, it's always tempting to try to  please your boss. 

This could be addressed by, say, appointing intel chiefs for set terms. (Layman sugg: There could be guards against potential abuses of power by allowing Congress to "impeach" or deconfirm a head.) So how does  the recent bill  affect  the independence of intel agencies? It dimishes it.

According to a piece stuffed in the Wash Post last week--yeah, I'm a slacker--the bill increases the president's power of intel agencies:  "PRESIDENT GETS TO FILL RANKS OF NEW INTELLIGENCE SUPERSTRUCTURE." Rather than just appoint the head of the CIA, the president now gets to name the top four officials in the overall intel 'superstructure .'  That'll sure get those officials calling 'em as they seem 'em.

ACLU's recluse issues

I'm thinking about doing a piece on the torture docs, namely why/how the ACLU grabbed them before the media did. (i.e.  Did the newspapers forget to file FOIAs?).

Anyway, I was  to call the ACLU, but I ran into a problem: They hide their phone number. At least I couldn't find it on their Web site.  (I got it  elsewhere, thanks.)