Eric Umansky

Relief Orgs

A list of charities--and  two sites where  the relief organizations are rated. For what it's worth, I  give to Mercy Corps (they offer a monthly contrib plan).  They're pretty highly rated and I've had a fine experience with them. For example, they never deluged me with junk mail.

The Art of Pointless Editorials, and Cheapshots

The NYT's lead editorial:

On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had been, after all, beyond devastation. Homeowners in Biloxi, Miss., staggered through wrecked neighborhoods looking for their loved ones. In New Orleans, the mayor reported that rescue boats had begun pushing past dead bodies to look for the stranded living. Gas leaks began erupting into flames, and looking at the city, now at least 80 percent under water, it was hard not to think of last year's tsunami, or even ancient Pompeii.

Disaster has, as it almost always does, called up American generosity and instances of heroism. Young people helped the old onto rafts in flooded New Orleans streets, and exhausted rescue workers refused all offers of rest, while people as far away as Kansas and Arizona went online to offer shelter in their homes to the refugees. It was also a reminder of how much we rely on government to imagine the unimaginable and plan for the worst. As the levees of Lake Pontchartrain gave way, flooding New Orleans, it seemed pretty clear that in this case, government did not live up to the job.

But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.

Yes, it does seem like the wrong moment to dwell on all that.

This is Getting Much Worse; and Proximity Bias

At least one levee in New Orleans appears to have been breeched. And now we have this from Reuters:

She spoke after an overnight breach in New Orleans' protective levee system allowed water from Lake Pontchartrain to flood most of the city.

In the Mississippi coastal city of Biloxi, hundreds may have been killed after being trapped in their homes when a 30-foot (9 meter) storm surge came ashore, a city spokesman said.

"It's going to be in the hundreds," spokesman Vincent Creel told Reuters. "Camille was 200, and we're looking at a lot more than that," he said, referring to Hurricane Camille, which hit the area in 1969 and destroyed swaths of Mississippi and Louisiana, killing a total of 256 people.

"The devastation is greater than our worst fears," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco told a news conference. "It's totally overwhelming."                                                          

The NYT adds this ominious bit:

A reporter who accompanied Jefferson Parish sheriff's rescue officials on a flight over the area saw floodwaters reaching to the eaves of some three-story houses. [emphsasis added]

According to the Times-Picayune's blog, there martial law has been declared in outlying parishes.

To get an overall sense of the damage in Mississippi, read this curt town-by-town roundup from the  local Sun-Herald. (Here's some video shot during the hurricane from Biloxi's mayor's office. )

Last night I chided some papers--particularly my nominal coworkers at the Washington Post-- for coming to premature and, as it turns out, overly optimistic assessments. Apart from whiffs of classism, the mistake I think was caused by (what should be dubbed if it's not already) proximity bias--the tendency to assume that the conditions observable to us   are similar elsewhere. Yeah, it's  human nature. Doesn't mean that reporters can't at least try to overcome it.

P.S. CNN has a list of places to donate here.

An Intriguing Bit of Goods News from Iraq

The WP:

RAMADI, Iraq, Aug. 30 -- U.S. warplanes backed Sunni Arab tribal fighters on Tuesday in what tribal leaders called an unprecedented Sunni-led offensive to drive out Abu Musab Zarqawi's forces.

Three days of ongoing fighting in towns near the Syrian border killed at least 61 people, at least 56 of them Tuesday, said Dr. Ali Rawi, emergency-room director at the hospital in the largest city near the fighting, Qaim, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Forty-two of them wore the black training-suits and athletic shoes favored by Zarqawi's fighters, Rawi said....

The clashes came after insurgents kidnapped and killed 31 men belonging to the Albu Mahal tribe because they had joined the Iraqi security forces, said Sheikh Muhammed Mahallawi, one of the tribe's leaders.

"We decided, either we force them out of the city or kill them," with the support of U.S. bombardment, Mahallawi said.

As Zathras advises below in comments, Ramadi (the dateline of the article above) is pretty far away from the scene of the fighting, and it's good to be skeptical of long-distanced reporting. Meanwhile, the NYT has a dispatch on the fighting--filed from Baghdad--that suggests, well, a murkier picture:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 30 - American fighter-bombers launched airstrikes in northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border this morning for the second time in the past week, destroying three houses in an area that has seen intense fighting between American forces and insurgent fighters, United States military officials said.

Iraqi Interior Ministry officials, citing reports from residents in the area, said the airstrikes had killed more than 40 civilians, mostly members of an extended Iraqi family who had sought shelter from the bombings together. The Arabiya satellite channel also reported more than 40 civilian deaths in the attacks, including women and children, and cited local hospital sources.

SecDef Rumsfeld, Portrait of a Hack

From the WP:

"Your mission is to go on offense, to go on the attack," Rumsfeld told the troops, praising those who are currently fighting. "They are engaging the terrorists where they live, so we don't have to engage them where Americans live."

Rummy, of course, doesn't believe the fly-paper B.S.  But apparently, he is one loyal worker.

Questions about the Superdome

Thousands of New Orleans residents with don't have the means to leave are taking shelter in it. So, how far above sea-level is the Superdome?

Less crucially, there's the question of how  the roof will fare. According to the National Weather Service, "High-rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously, a few to the point of total collapse. All windows will blow out. Airborne debris will be widespread, and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles."

I hope the questions quickly become moot, everything holds up, and everybody stays safe.

The Atta Mix-up

The theory, which I meekly offered last week, that Able Danger  may have mixed up Atta (aka Mohamed el-Amir) with another Mohamed al-Amir, is gaining credence.  As blogger Strata-Sphere pointed  out, there's a link between the other  al-Amir and  Sheik Rahman, best known as the blind cleric connected to WTC I bombing.  Could Able Danger have mixed up the two al-Amirs? Well, again as Strata-Sphere notes, it's sure telling that an Able Danger guys says "Atta" was spotted by A.D. thanks to... his connections Sheik Rahman.  (Bonus explication for the slow: Atta wasn't connected to  Rahman, but according to long-ago press reports,  other al-Amir was.)

Yet More Able Danger Atta Skepticism

From the LAT's Terry McDermott, who doesn't know anything special Able Danger but does about Atta. McDermott literally wrote  the book about Atta and the other hijackers.  I've chatted with McDermott before and posted some of his musings. Now he's  penned an op-ed explaining  why  Weldon, Shaffer and  Co. probably think Atta and why they're probably wrong:   

It is hard to see how computers could have named Atta as a member of an American cell before he got here. Some have argued that perhaps Able Danger mined data that included flight records of young Arab men traveling to Pakistan. Even if it did, it probably would not have found Atta. He was listed on airline flight manifests as Mohamed el-Amir, not Atta. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. El-Amir is how Atta was known to friends at school, to the banks that issued his credit cards and to the immigration service in Germany. It's the name on his high school and college diplomas.

But there is another possibility. Over the last four years I have interviewed dozens of people who swore they saw Atta somewhere he wasn't. This includes an assortment of waiters, students, flight instructors, taxi drivers and, more dramatically, two women who each claim to have been married to Atta, this despite the fact that they were never in the same city at the same time he was.

How could it be that so many people remember that they knew Atta, that they saw him or his name, when all the facts argue otherwise? I don't think they are all lying. Maybe none of them are. I think Atta entered an American psyche desperate for a name and face and an explanation. He came complete with what has become one of the iconic images of 9/11 — his Florida DMV mug shot, an image so memorable, so powerful and perfect for the moment that it allowed people to see in it whatever they needed to see. I think people subsequently, subconsciously placed that face where it made sense to them. There is no reason that a congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it.

The White House's Silence on Uzbekistan

David Corn wonders why the White House hasn't spoken up about the latest from Uzbekistan, where hundreds of protestors were massacred in May. Corn links to this from the Independent:

Uzbek authorities have jailed hundreds of people and forced them to confess to links to radical Islamists to justify the army crackdown on peaceful demonstrators last May that left 500 people dead, The Independent has learnt.

Human Rights Watch reports that witnesses of the massacre in the eastern city of Andizhan and relatives of the victims, have been rounded up and jailed for between 10 to 15 days on fabricated charges. "They are severely beaten and tortured until they sign statements confessing to being members of radical Islamic groups," a researcher for the group who has just visited the central Asian region said.

                                                

We've already lost future rights to the  airbase there.  But I understand. Sticking to a real policy  of "speading freedom and liberty" vs.  possibly a few extra months at a base. Must be a hard call.

An Argument for (Iraqi) Federalism

There are a couple of  traits I keep seeing in "plans" for Iraq: 1) Vague hopes and goals masquerading as strategies 2) a naive, uninformed, and myopic focus on American actions and plans.

I know,  most of the people offering the plans are American citizens and  it's only natural that we debate what our country should do and when our troops should stop having to put their lives on the line.   The problem though, is that the American-centric outlook is not the most helpful prism for coming up with strategies for Iraq (assuming of your strategy of course is somewhere short of  "get the troops out now and then who gives a  shit.")

An alternative approach is to try and  look at the problem through Iraqi eyes and devise  a strategy built from the ground up  to address the  specifics of Iraq. That' hard. And maybe you think the time has passed where we should still try to do what's best for Iraqis. But a strategy built on the realities of Iraq isn't necessarily a moral proposition, it could just be the best strategy, the one that still offers a bit of hope of  eventually withdrawing troops without  leaving a failed  state  and festering terrorist breeding ground (which is what we  have now, by the way). 

The one plan  I've seen that makes a serious stab at that: Peter Galbraith's call for, yes, a loose federation, in effect the break-up of Iraq.

When I first heard about the idea last year, I didn't buy it, not the least because, what are you going to do with Baghdad, a multi-ethnic city.   But  Galbraith's analysis of the dynamics in Iraq, which he wrote it nearly 18 months ago, have proved to be impressively  prescient: "The fundamental problem of Iraq is an absence of Iraqis. ... The interim constitution gives       the central government a monopoly on military force, control over natural resources, broad       fiscal powers, and oversight over the judiciary.     Little of this will come to pass. "

What Galbraith suggests is that we should stop wasting  (in his opinion) so much  energy on a solution that doesn't fit the reality--a strong central government. Instead we should use our limited resources and influence in a kind of jujitsu move, to recognize and even try to leverage the realities in Iraq, which means supporting effectively, a break-up in all but name.

I don't know enough to proclaim  this the absolute best  least bad  strategy possible.  And it does raise some questions: How can you do that and not piss Sunnis even more thus fueling the insurgency? Maybe you pay them off, have a  loose confederation except for a one national oil company that shares revenue?  Moreover, Moqtada  Sadr's moves against the draft seem at least partly motivated by his recognition that his millions if Shiite supporters in Baghdad aren't likely to be pysched  about the possibility of finding themselves stuck in an oil-less Sunnistan.

But the details  of Galbraith's plan aside, at least he's  using an Iraq-savvy  schema to come up with them. And that's more than you can say can say for most of the other plans out there. (You can take a look at his plan here.)