SYNDICATED COLUMN: Oops Nation

The System Works? Not Really

Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain “disappeared,” possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.

For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied “unlawful enemy combatants” (or, as Dick Cheney called them, “the worst of the worst” terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence
against them in a court of law.

Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America’s latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other American gulags, will now be allowed to demand their day in court. Since the government doesn’t have evidence against them, legal experts say, most if not all of “the worst of the worst” will ultimately walk free. “Liberty and security can be reconciled,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

In short: Oops.

“America is back,” Barack Obama has said he will tell the world if he becomes president. Even if McCain wins, Guantánamo will probably be closed. Torture will be re-illegalized. Which is really, really great. But there’s a problem. How do we give back the four years we stole from Murat Kurnaz?

In December 2001, Kurnaz was a 19-year-old German Muslim studying in Pakistan. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani security services, who delivered him to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty. He was flown to Guantánamo concentration camp, where he received what The Village Voice‘s Nat Hentoff calls “the standard treatment: beatings, sleep deprivation, and special month-long spells of solitary confinement in a sealed cell without ventilation.”

He went on hunger strike, and Kurnaz’s tormentors apparently worried he might starve to death. After 20 days “they gagged me and shoved a tube up my nose, stopping several times because the tube filled with blood,” Kurnaz remembers.

What did this “worst of the worst” do to deserve such treatment? Nothing. But don’t take my word for it. Six months into his ordeal, the U.S. military determined, there was “no definite link or evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”

The U.S. government knew Kurnaz was innocent. Yet they held on to him another three and a half years.

Oops.

It would be comforting if the torture of innocent men sold by self-interested bounty hunters were an aberration. It wasn’t. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis confirms the horrifying results of a Seton Hall University study. “Only eight percent of Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces,” reports McClatchy. “86 percent were turned over to the U.S. by Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance,” a coalition of Afghan warlords. “The bounty hunters were often the source of allegations.”

Right-wingers say security matters can only be entrusted to the military. “The courts,” writes Richard Samp of the pro-government Washington Legal Foundation in USA Today, “simply lack the expertise and resources to justify second-guessing military experts on such issues.” Maybe. But the military is run by liars.

“The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush Administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren’t ‘the worst of the worst.’ From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn’t belong there.”

At least six died at Gitmo. (The Pentagon characterized a spate of suicides as clever acts of “asymmetrical warfare.”)

Oops.

Deranged leaders who carry out horrific acts of mass murder and oppression with the consent of the people are hardly new to American history, reminds Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States. “Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s,” he told a commencement ceremony at Southern Methodist University. “Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the Cold War McCarthy era, and from there the civil liberties climate in our time.”

So many oopsies! But those are temporary excesses, Weinstein reassures. “Self-corrective forces at work in American society”–lefties, liberals, a single swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court–always pull us back before we careen off the brink. Disaster is avoided.

Which would be fine if it weren’t for the problem that: (1) one of these days, Justice Kennedy won’t be around to restore the rule of law. The other problem being (2): a lot of “witches” get drowned during our periodic episodes of madness.

No one was ever held accountable for blacklisting actors or massacring Native Americans. Such tacit endorsement of villainy sets the stage for the next outrage committed during a future “temporary madness” driven by national security worries. Apologies are rare. Penance is scarce and stingy. The government stole the homes and businesses of Japanese-Americans and shipped them to concentration camps during World War II; decades passed before Congress cut them checks for a measly $10,000.

We think we Americans are good people who do bad things when we’re not on top of our game. “Self-corrective forces,” we pat ourselves on our collective backsides, always kick in before we go too far.

But that’s not really how it is.

Some Americans are good. Other Americans are bad. And the good ones are often lazy, willing to let the bad ones get their way.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: It Takes a Symbol to Hold Back a Nation of Millions

The Empty Politics of Singularity

As an African-American, Ward Connerly uses his skin color to draw attention to his otherwise unremarkable politics: he’s a right-wing Republican who hates affirmative action. Now this ideological freak is using Barack Obama’s racial heritage (half of it, anyway) to argue that racism is all in the past.

“The entire argument for race preferences is that society is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” Connerly told The New York Times after Obama claimed the Democratic nomination. “The historic success of Senator Obama, as well as Senator Clinton, dismantles that argument.”

Connerly said he “choked up” at the sight of Obama’s victory. “He did it by his own achievement. Nobody gave it to him.” Well, sure. Except for a little help from Chicago’s Daley political machine (a.k.a. white guys). Obama may also have benefited from a race-based preference when his application arrived at Columbia College. (Shout-out to my former colleagues at Columbia’s office of admissions and financial aid: free beers for a week for an hour in the archives.)

Behold the politics of singularity. If one (half-)black guy can make it, anyone can. Those who fail have no one to blame but their own lazy, excuse-making selves.

Seven years ago, conservatives like Connerly were pointing to George W. Bush’s cabinet appointments, 50 percent of which went to women or people of color, as proof that minorities no longer had anything to complain about. “If you look at my administration, it’s diverse, and I’m proud of that,” Bush said of Colin Powell and Condi Rice, charter members of African-Americans Against Blacks. Minorities may well have followed the right’s edict to quit whining and start working. But the rise of Alberto Gonzales to attorney general, for example, only helped one Latino: himself.

Even within the White House, tokenism has limits. “The Bush Administration,” found a Newsday study of 2,800 political appointees, “is not nearly as diverse as it appears…Blacks held 7 percent of administration jobs under Bush, less than half of the 16 percent they held under Clinton…Women won 36 percent of Bush’s appointments, noticeably fewer than the 44 percent of Clinton’s.”

Reflexive churlishness aside, after watching my fellow citizens passively accept torture, concentration camps, domestic surveillance, government kidnappings, two useless wars and two stolen elections, Obamamania is fun. It’s refreshing to be proud of my fellow Americans. Those who vote in Democratic primaries, anyway.

So the Democratic Party isn’t racist. What remains to be seen is whether America is. Will general election voters support a thoughtful, vigorous and handsome African-American running against a rigid, aging militarist pushing the policies of the most unpopular president in history?

To prevail in November, Obama must win the votes of millions of whites who supported George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Though not necessarily racist themselves, these swing voters were certainly willing to tolerate Bush’s racism. Bush famously beat McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries by waging a whispering campaign about McCain’s “black” daughter by a prostitute (actually, she was born in Bangladesh and was adopted). He also spoke at Bob Jones University. “Bob Jones University is opposed to intermarriage of the races because it breaks down the barriers God has established,” BJU administrators wrote to students in 1998–a ban that remained in force when Bush went there.

McCain is the lamest GOP candidate since Bob Dole, running in the least propitious year for Republicans since 1974. If a black guy can win, this is the year.

To be sure, an Obama victory couldn’t have happened in 1964, when I was one year old, or even 1980, when I was 17. (Reagan won that year by winking at the KKK and decrying black “welfare queens.”) Obama’s inauguration would mark America’s long, but undeniable progress since LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. A biracial president with a Muslim parent would broadcast to the world that America’s post-9/11 madness is finally winding down. But it would hardly mean that minorities, or women for that matter, had achieved equality.

Disparities in healthcare highlight some of the many inequities in an American economy suffering from staggering disparity of wealth.

Just last week a Dartmouth study showed that African-Americans with diabetes are five times more likely than whites to lose a limb to amputation. Blue Cross and Blue Shield released another survey the same day, this one showing that even African-American women who have medical insurance stand less of a chance of surviving breast cancer than whites. “The death rate for black women from breast cancer was the same up through 1981,” said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and a professor at Emory University. “Every year, the death rate has gotten more divergent. The difference for black women and white women in 2005 was greater than it was in 1995, and it is greater in ’95 than it was in 1985.”

Everywhere you look, it sucks to be black in America. Swimming classes cost money. African-Americans don’t make as much money as whites. So they don’t sign up their kids at the same rate as whites. It might not sound like a big deal–until you learn that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, black children between the ages of five and 14 drown at two and half times the rate of white kids.

Good for Barack Obama. But our national obsession with the triumph of the individual (while ignoring disasters suffered by millions) reminds me of the old joke about the man in the car driving past a hitchhiker at 60 mph. Their average speed is 30. But they’re each enjoying a different experience.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Under the Sword of Damocles (2008 Essay)

Originally published in Men’s Journal magazine in 2008:

High in the remotest mountains of the remotest province of the remotest nation in central Asia, a breathtaking lake is poised to unleash an inland tsunami that could kill 5 million people. Our writer couldn’t resist being one of the first outsiders to see it on foot. By Ted Rall

“Make it to the chaikhana,” I’d comforted my bleeding feet and burning lungs throughout our 14-hour trudge, “and you’ll be fine.” Turkic for “tea house,” chaikhana is the locals’ tongue-in-cheek nickname for what turned out to be a Neolithic-style campsite, a jumble of enormous boulders broken off the grey-white zigzag Pamir mountains that towered over the gorge we’d been following all day. But now, warm and dry in my sleeping bag, completely exhausted, blistering sunburn soothed with Noxzema, sleep was out of the question. Impending doom echoed off the canyon walls in surround sound.

I wasn’t worried about local Taliban-trained guerillas. And I didn’t think once about dangerous Caspian tigers (though officially extinct, Tajiks say they see them all the time). Snow-capped mountains brittle as glass were falling apart directly above our heads, SUV-sized boulders and slate missiles shaken loose by a barely perceptible drizzle. Crack! A rock the size of a basketball grazed our donkey driver, nearly killing him. We moved closer to the river, with the ominous roar of late spring snowmelt rushing down the Murgab River just outside our tent.

“Did you hear that?” I asked my wife.

“Yeah,” she said. “The water—it sounds like it’s flowing faster. Like there’s more of it. Can we do anything if it happens now?” It.

Even 12 hours’ warning wouldn’t help. “Where could we go?” I replied. “Over those mountains? There’s 10 feet of snow up there.” But there wouldn’t be any warning. Just a deafening roar. Then nothing.

We were still two days’ climb from Lake Sarez, a freak of nature at 11,200 feet known as Asia’s Sword of Damocles. Here, in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), a sparsely populated knot of forbidding mountains in the poorest backwater I’d-like-to-buy-a-vowel-Stan of the former Soviet Union, four cubic miles of water rests high above the Pamiri plateau, held back by a jumble of rocks.

The physics are simple. The potential devastation is incomprehensible. No one knows when this dam will break, but in the most seismically active region on the planet, where major earthquakes of 6 or 7 on the Richter scale are routine, most geologists’ computer models warn it’s inevitable that a wall of water half the height of the World Trade Center will scour this gorge and barrel down one mountain valley after another, taking out hundreds of villages and towns in four countries over 1,200 miles—the distance from New York to Kansas City.

Five million people would die. It would be the worst natural catastrophe in human history, and it would catch the world completely by surprise.

We landed at Dushanbe airport at two in the morning; it took another four hours for the baggage handlers to rifle through our stuff for valuables. After checking in at the downtown Hotel Tajikistan (a rundown Soviet-era cement pile under renovation before a five-star Hyatt allegedly opens later this year), we paid a visit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where I promised not to blow up the dam, and then stocked up on food. With nearly total unemployment and an economy so flimsy that paper currency occasionally stops circulating in favor of barter, you have to bring in all the supplies you need.

I’d seen it all before: In 2001 Tajikistan’s only link to the West was its torturous “Baby Flot” state carrier Tajikistan Airlines, which offered anytime, anywhere flights, as long as you traveled on Saturday and only to Istanbul. Ten years after independence, phone calls were still routed through Moscow. Dushanbe nights were punctuated by AK-47 fire as exhaustion brought an inconclusive end to a decade-long civil war between the authoritarian central government and a coalition of radical Islamists and democratic reformers. Tajikistan had consulates in just three countries, the same as the Taliban on 9/11.

The Tajik embassy in Kazakhstan was a ruined flat in an Almaty housing project, with a red, white and green Tajik flag duct-taped at a 30-degree angle to the front door, the plastic doorframe riddled with bullet holes. “You should not go,” the ambassador told me then, clearly unaccustomed to visitors. “Tajikistan has nothing for anyone.”

Well, it certainly had something for me. Tajikistan is weird, inconvenient and offers little in the way of conventional tourism. For those willing to make the trip, this remote cultural kaleidoscope offers breathtaking scenery, some of the world’s tallest mountains, and a front-row seat to an epic struggle between lingering Soviet authoritarianism and rising Islamic fundamentalism in an impoverished country forced to invent its history and culture from scratch after 1991. Here, far from the prying eyes of the world, geopolitical fundamentals are being reassessed. Tajikistan’s water resources could become even more desirable than Kazakhstan’s huge oil reserves and Turkmenistan’s limitless natural gas.

Today Tajik embassies circle the globe. No more hanging around Ashkhabat waiting to see if your visa application will require yet another bribe; I Fedexed my passport to Washington and got my visa days later. Though Tajikistan Airlines continues to ply the Stinger-missile-targeted skies between Istanbul and Dushanbe, an extra hundred bucks buys you edible food, a sober pilot and a climatized cabin on Turkish Airlines.

But Lake Sarez is locked in old Tajikistan, where Lenin’s statue remains ubiquitous in the hope that Vladimir Putin will come to his senses and invite them back. Gorno-Badakhshan is sealed off from the rest of Tajikistan by an endless series of roadblocks—payback, government officials freely concede, for the province’s decision to declare independence during the civil war. A GBAO permit issued by the Office of Visas and Registration, domestic surveillance bureau of the Tajik KGB, is the only way to get past military checkpoints, still manned until recently by Russia’s 201st motorized rifle division. Access to the Bartang River valley, the jumping-off point to Lake Sarez, requires a letter from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the agency concerned with earthquakes or terrorist attacks on Usoi Dam. Well-placed gifts shortened the two-month wait to a couple of weeks. Our fixer suggested we use the wait to triple our normal 10-mile-per-week running regimen to prepare our lungs for the rigors of high-altitude climbing—even by Central Asian standards, the Pamir mountains are intimidating.

On an early visit to Dushanbe, a local drinking buddy had regaled me with the terrifying threat posed by Sarez, trying to warn me off. “Not even Tajiks can go to the Pamirs,” he said. “It is forbidden. And anyway, it’s too dangerous.” After that, it was all I could think about.

Our rust-red ’01 Mitsubishi Montero was packed with our Tajik team—driver, translator, and mountain guide—plus replacement parts for the car (no repair shops in the GBAO), jerry cans of gas (no gas stations), gear, cases of water and a dozen enormous winter melons (no markets or bazaars). If everything goes well, the drive to Barchadev, the village nearest to Lake Sarez, requires four 16-hour days on back-breaking dirt roads through land littered with spent ordnance and ruined tanks from the recent civil war. More than once our mountain guide, Umar Abdulloev, pointed out promontories where pro-Dushanbe forces had tossed bound and gagged Pamiris accused of sympathizing with the United Tajik Opposition into the swollen river below.

We lost our brakes a couple of times. As our driver Kamal worked on repairs, elderly women brought us blankets and chai. We were stopped at countless checkpoints manned by teenage soldiers, but never encountered the mujahedeen of the Islamic Movement of Turkestan (IMT), notorious for the 2000 kidnapping of four American rock climbers and nearly toppling the Uzbek government during summer offensives launched from anarchic Tajikistan.

We were more scared of our driver’s music.

A thirtysomething soccer fanatic with an easy laugh, Kamal was the best traveled of the bunch. On trips to Abu Dhabi and Beijing he’d picked up the mixed emotions of capitalist malaise. “I make money, I can travel everywhere,” he mused. “But Soviet times were better. Nobody had as much freedom, but we didn’t have to work hard.” Kamal plugged in a tiny MP3 player. He swore it held 25 songs. We counted eight. “This one is by an American basketball player,” Kamal explained as Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” came on for the tenth time that afternoon. But it was sweet deliverance after Limp Bizkit’s cover of “Behind Blue Eyes.” We heard the same rotation every half hour, day after day.

A century ago, the mountain people of eastern Tajikistan were completely isolated. There were no roads. Each village worshiped gods and spoke a dialect of Pamiri distinct from neighbors around the next mountain. Usoi was one of hundreds of such hamlets nestled along icy rivers in the high Pamirs, thousands of feet above the tree line and snowed in more than half the year. As they’d done for centuries, Usoi’s families relied on subsistence farming and fishing the Murgab River near their stone and mud houses, as oblivious to the world as it was to them.

At 11:15pm on February 18, 1911, the tectonic plate beneath the Hindu Kush resumed its inexorable drift into the Pamirs, pushing them upward and jolting the Murgab valley with a powerful 7.4-scale earthquake. A nameless mountain above Usoi exploded in a massive rockslide that wiped away Usoi and its 54 residents before settling into a sprawl of rocks two miles wide and half a mile deep. “After the collapse, tremors continued for a few more days,” researcher O. E. Agakhanianz paraphrased surviving eyewitnesses in 1989. “Dust settled only after three days and rocks kept falling from the slopes for 15 more years.” The Murgab River began backing up from the site of the new dam, named after the village it entombed. Eight months later, rising water claimed the next village upstream: Sarez.

Today Lake Sarez is 37 miles long, a mile wide and 600 feet deep. It continues to creep upstream through a deep gorge bordered by spectacular 18,000-foot peaks—an area called “the roof of the world.”

Not everyone worries that an earthquake could shatter Usoi Dam. Another quake might instead dislodge a rockslide into the lake, creating a wave that crests the dam and erodes its foundation. Other experts, noting that Lake Sarez is rising eight inches a year, think the dam will eventually succumb to the weight and buckle. Most agree on one thing: as long as the Murgab River keeps feeding the lake, the lake level will keep rising. When it nears the top of the dam, disaster is inevitable.

“Some 1,500 people live directly below the lake in the Murgab gorge,” Moscow State University professor Samuel Grigorian told a United Nations conference in 1998. “With the nearest villages 19 miles from Sarez, a flood wave moving about 16 feet per second would reach them in less than an hour. They would all be killed.”

I asked Umar whether he thinks much about the destruction hanging over his head. His smile vanished. “Every Tajik worries about Sarez.”

We had hoped to stay at the only hotel between Dushanbe and Sarez in the border town of Khorog, but it was booked up by Doctors Without Borders (but not, apparently, without reservations). We swung up the Bartang River road, a laughable mess of holes so brutal the government provides ramps for motorists to repair shattered axles. “Why don’t they use that money to fix the road?” I asked. Kamal shot me a “stupid question” look in the mirror.

We spent the night at a home stay in Khijez, a Bartang Valley oasis of slender birch trees, lush grass and grazing goats surrounded by majestic snow-capped mountains. There were scattered signs of international assistance: a small hydroelectric generating station donated by France, a bridge from Japan, rusted tins of rapeseed oil marked “Gift of USA.” Chump change. The Tajik government can’t afford a future for the residents of Khijez, the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to shore up and/or bypass the dam. I thought to myself, can’t the U.S. use five million new best friends in the Muslim world? Our dinner hosts were kind but fatalistic. I asked the father about his two daughters, smiling gamely in the doorway. Did they attend school?

“No one here sends their children to school,” he replied. “Why should we? We’re all going to die.”

We rolled into Barchadev, nursing concussions, achy tailbones and incipient altitude sickness. We planned to spend a day adjusting to the altitude, then start hiking the 19 miles up to Lake Sarez. We checked in with the village headman, a father of eight with an impressive Osama-like beard who runs the local Sarez alert station. Without a working transmitter and sure to be washed away with the rest of the village, he rents it out as a guesthouse. We were the first visitors this year.

“How many expeditions last year?” I asked.

“Six,” he said. “But none made it past the chaikhana.” A day’s hike north.

Bad news: Snow was forecast for the mountains. There would be no time to acclimate. We hired a donkeyman, crashed at the warning station/guesthouse, and set out before dawn along the Murgab River, which leaches out the bottom of Usoi Dam to form steep, ferocious rapids. Wincing under a piercing sun that burned our heads and shoulders while failing to make a dent in the 35-degree late-June chill, we trudged up the slope over dicey goat paths and thousands of unstable boulders. The donkey stumbled repeatedly on the sliding rocks, nearly losing his life and, more relevantly, our gear. Our ankles twisted left and right, forward and back. Umar’s sneakers fell apart. Every hour or so we’d encounter a rusty solar-powered monitoring camera a Swiss team had mounted on the walls of the canyon. I couldn’t avoid the image of a roaring inland tsunami around the next bend.

I sat next to our mountain guide Rashid Tashmoradov as we refilled our water bottles from the Murgab. Stoic and less helpful in tight spots than the donkey guy, Rashid decided I was worthless after I confessed I hadn’t served in the military. He would walk fast, ramrod straight, wait for us to catch up, and then rush forward again. “How are we doing?” I asked.

“You are not alpinists,” Rashid said, his glare oozing disgust.

“I never said we were alpinists,” I pointed out. “We’re journalists. We’ve come to see and write about Sarez.”

Umar pointed out where a rope suspension bridge once crossed the river, connecting to a semi-paved Soviet-era path on the north side. Last year, a young Russian climber had fallen from the bridge. It wasn’t a big drop, maybe eight feet, but his body, dashed on the rocks, was never recovered.

“Last year, the water rose one meter and took it out,” Umar said. That was four times the previous rate of increase. The path was now underwater.

An unimpressive run of muddy slush filled the bottom of a small crevasse. “Glaciers like that are thousands of years old,” Umar translated for the donkey guy. “They’ve melted away in the last year or two.” Global warming is upping the stakes at Sarez.

Looking back down the valley, it was easy to envision floodwater gushing toward Barchadev and beyond, turning south at the Murgab’s confluence with the Bartang River. The 75-mile Bartang Valley, cultural and spiritual heartland of the Ismaili Muslims, would lose 30 villages and 7,000 people. The Bartang empties into the Pyanj, a large river that marks the border with northern Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan. Six hundred miles downstream from Lake Sarez, the flood would cross into another time zone. Even this far downstream, Scott Weber of the U.N. Department for Humanitarian Affairs told New Scientist in 1999, “the wall of water would still be as high as a two-story house.”

The city of Termiz in southern Uzbekistan is home to 140,000 people, the Uzbek-Afghan Friendship Bridge that the Soviets used to invade Afghanistan, and currently a German airbase with 3,000 NATO troops. Termiz would be obliterated. The water would keep going. The Pyanj is a tributary of the Amu Darya, which Alexander the Great knew as the Oxus. The flood path would continue along the Amu Darya, roughly marking the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, before emptying into the shrunken Aral Sea, 1,200 miles downstream of Sarez. The flood would actually do the Aral more harm than good, dredging up heavy metals and toxic sediments currently locked in the dry seabed.

The ancient Silk Road cities of Khiva and Turkmenabat (100,000 people total) would be destroyed, as would most of the arable land in Central Asia. Five million people—mostly residents of landlocked deserts that routinely reach 125 degrees—would be drowned by snow melt.

At the chaikhana, we pitched our tents in the shadow of a boulder to protect us from falling rocks and scrounged dead brush for a fire. As darkness fell, we fled for our sleeping bags, teeth chattering despite two layers of long underwear. I thought about how we were masters of shitty timing: I hit Islamabad the day of General Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup d’état. We picked New Years Eve 2000 to check into a Jordanian hotel targeted in the Millennium Plot. Usoi Dam might be a century old, but given our luck, it would pick that night to collapse.

Fortified by a can of Russian mystery meats and a rock-hard nan bread we’d picked up in Dushanbe a week earlier, we loaded up on river water—we wouldn’t see any more before Sarez—and headed up mountain tracks too thin to place both feet side by side without risking a tumble down into the river, soon just a bright blue pencil line hundreds of feet below. It was a brutal climb: 15 miles of 30- to 45-degree incline over wobbly boulders and bottomless holes. Two hours in, my six bottles of water were gone. I didn’t urinate; I was sweating it all out. I had welts on my shoulders, a grinding left knee and aches in every muscle and joint. Parched, blisters opening in the craters of older blisters, freezing and sunburned, I ordered myself to keep placing one foot in front of the other.

I was fighting against vertigo when a sudden wind came perilously close to knocking me over a cliff.

“Keep going!” Umar yelled from behind. I froze.

“I can’t move.”

“You’ll fall off if you don’t,” he said. I took a step. Gravel rolled away, dropping into the gorge. I picked a stable-looking slab of slate and stepped forward. One more step. Another. The slate slid off behind me. We scrambled around foot-wide ledges, sweaty hands pulling brittle shale from what looked like solid rock. It was the most physically challenging thing I’d ever attempted.

Even Rashid, leading our sad, thirsty troop across a random route between mountain passes, was suffering. We hadn’t seen the donkey or his attendant since morning. No one spoke. It was silent, lifeless—no scrubby plants, no birds, not even the buzz of a bug. By mid-afternoon the steep climb leveled off, with huge black boulders stretching out for miles.

“Umar!” I cried, pointing down. “Usoi?”

He smiled. “Yes, Usoi.”

As I thought about the villagers buried under millions of tons of rock, I knew one of my goals of this trek to Lake Sarez, to get a sense of the scale of the place and evaluate the threat it posed, was impossible. Standing in the middle of Usoi Dam, I couldn’t see its edges. I came over a rise, expecting to see the lake, only to encounter more dam.

Until I didn’t.

A glimpse of azure water appeared ahead. I shouted: “Sarez!”

Actually, it was Shadau, a smaller lake adjacent to (and sometimes connected with) Sarez, fed by a tributary of the Murgab. Sarez was still several hours of bouldering away. We soldiered on, thirst leaving our tongues thick and cardboardy.

Umar told me Rashid was surprised we hadn’t crapped out after the chaikhana. I asked why.

“Most Tajiks can’t do it,” he said. “Foreigners never make it.”

“So—are we alpinists now?” I asked.

He didn’t smile. “No,” he answered. “You are not alpinists.” But he didn’t glare.

I could report that I walked up to the new monitoring station at Lake Sarez and proudly shook hands with its employees. (The old one, a 1960s-vintage hunting cabin, is threatened by the rising lake.) But that would be a lie. “Water,” I croaked. As usual, Rashid glared at my weakness. My head felt like it was in a vice. I downed a gallon jug and collapsed in white dust under the station’s corrugated tin roof. When I awoke, I took in Sarez. It was like a lake on an asteroid, reflecting the awe-inspiring snowy peaks all around on its still, glassy surface, already less than 50 meters from the top of the dam. Mineral deposits had turned the water an inorganic process blue. Airless, lifeless, simultaneously hot and cold, a third of the way to the cruising altitude of a passenger jet, everything screamed get out—you’re not supposed to be here.

Yet there we were. Dead tired, breathless, brains and eyes burning from the sun, and unlike almost everyone else who’d seen this strange place, we didn’t come by military helicopter. Lake Sarez is indisputably beautiful—eerie and anomalous, a source of delicious water where big fish swim in schools. In recognition of its dual role as threat and promise, Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon recently proposed that its water be piped out and bottled. The place would be a tourist attraction if it wasn’t so completely inaccessible.

Every six months a new team of leather-faced locals chopper in from Barchadev to take charge of the facility for the Ministry of Emergency Situations. The four men hang out, play cards, drink vodka, and surf a sporadic satellite Internet connection. They’d planted a few saplings, but in the barren soil the dry sticks stood like gravemarkers, testimony to the futility of hope. At one point someone shouted: A butterfly! It bumbled along, searching in vain for something living to land on. The men hadn’t seen an insect in months.

They’re supposed to report anything that happens—earthquakes, rockslides, an 800-foot-high wall of water heading west—using a military radio connected to Dushanbe. Most of the time, however, the signal isn’t powerful enough to broadcast. Not that it would matter if it did. There’s no real evacuation plan. Relations with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, two nations that would lose millions of people, can charitably be called “strained.” It’s all very “Omega Man.”

With only enough vodka for the four ministry employees, our request to crash was rejected. The next day, we’d look around the lake and begin the brutal climb out. As we left, the boss made what may or may not have been a joke:

“We’ll be the last four men left alive in Tajikistan.”

Ted Rall at MoCCA Sunday

I’ll be signing books at the MoCCA Arts Fest in New York City this coming Sunday, from 12 noon to 2 pm at the NBM table. This will likely be my last appearance at MoCCA, which I helped found.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The E-Word

The U.S. Has Rivals and Competitors, Not Enemies

“A Gallup poll,” Libby Quaid wrote for the Associated Press on June 2nd, “found that two-thirds of [Americans] said they believe it would be a good idea for the president to meet with the leaders of enemy countries.”

Who are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. “Enemy countries”? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn’t have enemy countries.

September 11 aside, citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies–more like wholly owned subsidiaries. As for the rest of the world, well, they’ve been pretty nice to us.

Not that we deserve it. Since 1941, the U.S. has attacked, among others, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Not once were we defending ourselves. We were always the aggressor. Over the course of six decades during which we were the world’s leading instigator of armed conflict, no one attacked us–not even the people we attacked! No one declared war upon us.

Yet everywhere you turn, on every channel and in every newspaper, there’s some politician or journalist using that word to describe another country: enemy. John McCain bashes Barack Obama for appeasing “the enemy” (he means Iran). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, also about Obama and Iran, Joe Lieberman sniped: “Too many Democrats seem to have become confused about the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.” After 9/11 self-loathing gay neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan called opponents of the Bush Administration “the enemy within the West itself–a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column.” The Bush Administration even incorporates the E-word in a term it invented, found nowhere in U.S. or international law, to describe its political prisoners: “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Enemies! Enemies! Enemies! Enemies everywhere, but never an attack.

Slacker enemies!

Iran isn’t an enemy. It’s a regional rival, a competitor, and a relatively good-natured one at that. Not only did the Iranians open a western front against the Taliban during America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, they offered assistance to downed U.S. pilots. Iran has requested talks leading to the establishment of full diplomatic relations. We keep refusing. The British have since backed away from their claims that new Iranian-made improvised explosive devices were killing U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. (The story never made sense, given that they were used by Sunni insurgent groups–who hate Shiite Iran.)

Occasionally someone tries to point out the obvious: we’re not at war. No war = no enemies. It’s the truth. But the truth doesn’t go over well.

James Rubin, assistant secretary of state under President Clinton, was interviewed recently by the Journal‘s Paul Gigot on Fox News. “I think it’s quite clear that Iran and North Korea and others are a danger to the United States,” Rubin said.

Gigot laid into Rubin: “You said a danger, but you didn’t say enemies. Are they enemies?”

Rubin: “Well, I don’t know, you know, enemies–we’re not in a state of war with Iran. Traditionally, the word ‘enemy’ is for a state of war. We’re in a state war with the Shiite militias, with Al Qaeda, we’re in a state of war.”

Gigot: “But they’re contributing–“

Rubin: “Iran has policies that we object to and we reject, and we should confront.”

Gigot: “But they’re contributing to the deaths of Americans, if you listen to the American military, in Iraq, by supporting some of those rogue militias. Doesn’t that make them enemies?” [Ted here: These claims were debunked two years before this exchange.]

Rubin: “That makes them a country that is dangerous to the United States, and we need to confront that danger directly.” In other words, a country can supply weapons to your enemy without becoming your enemy. Which, considering that the U.S. is the world’s largest arms merchant, is a good thing. The last thing we need is more enemies! (Not that we have any now.)

Why do we call states with whom we disagree “enemies”? Religion writer Eboo Patel blames radical Islamists, and 9/11 for spooking us. “Terrorism,” Patel wrote in Slate, “is more than heinous murder and guerrilla theater. It is a kind of macabre magic intended to create the illusion of enemies everywhere.”

Trouble is, Americans were freaking out long before 9/11. The reason? American conservatives, whose views are automatically accepted as conventional wisdom before eventually getting discredited, constantly see monsters in closets full of nothing but outdated fashions. “Iran has been at war with us for 27 years, and we have discussed every imaginable subject with them,” shrieked The National Review‘s Michael Ledeen during 2006’s Iranian-IEDs-are-killing-American-soldiers propaganda campaign. “We have gained nothing, because there is nothing to be gained by talking with an enemy who thinks he is winning. From [the Iranians’] standpoint, the only thing to be negotiated is the terms of the American surrender.”

Twenty-seven years–what a war! How on earth did we fail to notice it?

And “surrender”! How exactly would surrendering to Iran work? Wouldn’t they have to attack us first, you know, just for show? Do snotty remarks about Israel count as actual attacks with bullets and stuff? How would the Islamic Republic’s modest military occupy the United States and beat its 300 million heavily armed citizens into submission?

Enemies? Not yet. But we’re working on it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Stan Trek 2009?

One of the chapters in “Silk Road to Ruin” describes my 2000 trip to Central Asia, in which I took 23 listeners to my radio show on KFI in Los Angeles to Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. (We tried to enter Tajikistan and Afghanistan but got hosed by the outbreak of an insurgent campaign by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.)

It was a proto-reality show, simulcast live on KFI and NPR’s “The Savvy Traveler.” There’s a link to the Savvy Traveler segment somewhere online. But it was hard, and not only on the 23 innocents abroad. It was hard on me to keep this motley crew of 12 to 61 year olds under control so they’d all come back alive and safe.

Over the years I have received numerous requests to take another group of people to the Stans. And so, I hereby announce: STAN TREK 2009!

Here’s the specs:

Limited to 15 spots
Fee: aproximately $10,000 per person (does not include hotels, meals, incidentals, etc.–only transportation).
When: Summer 2009
How Long: 5-6 weeks
Where: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan (and if possible, Turkmenistan)
What you get: A guided rock-n-roll trip through the most fascinating and difficult place on earth to travel
Possible bonus threat: You might be filmed for a reality TV show

If you’re interested, please drop me a line at chet@rall.com. Do NOT reply unless you will have the money, vacation time, and tolerance for dicey foreign food required. I will personally interview and pick and choose who goes.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Kids in America(n Torture Camps)

Why Does the Media Cover Up War Crimes?

In last week’s column I cited New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau as a prime example of what ails us: reporters who don’t report, a.k.a. journalists who love the government too much.

When Lichtblau found out that the Bush Administration was listening to Americans’ phone calls and reading their e-mail, he decided to hold the story. Instead of fulfilling his duty to the Times’ readers and running with it, he asked the White House for permission. By the time the NSA domestic surveillance story finally ran, 14 months had passed–and Bush had won the 2004 election.

Again, in a May 17th piece bearing the headline “FBI Gets Mixed Review in Interrogation Report,” Lichtblau is running interference for the government. “A new Justice Department report praises the refusal of FBI agents to take part in the military’s abusive questioning of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan,” begins the article, “but it also finds fault with the bureau’s slow response to complaints about the tactics from its own agents.”

“Abusive questioning.” “Harsh interrogation tactics.”

According to the Justice Department report, “routine” treatment of Guantánamo prisoners–witnessed by the FBI–includes “bending the detainee’s thumbs back and grabbing his genitals.” Military and CIA torturers chained detainees’ hands and feet together for as long as a full day, “left to defecate on themselves.” They terrorized them with dogs, stripped them and made them wear women’s underwear and subjected them to blaring music, freezing cold and searing heat.

Torture. Such a simple word. Why not use it?

Lichtblau’s “mixed review” appellation notwithstanding, the report by the Justice Department paints a shocking, uniformly negative portrait of a federal law enforcement agency whose officers react to appalling conduct with the Nuremberg defense–“I was just following orders.”

“Indeed,” reported U.S. News & World Report, “time after time, the report concludes that FBI agents saw or heard about numerous interrogation methods–from sleep deprivation to duct-taping detainees’ mouths to scaring them with dogs–that plainly violated their own agency’s code of conduct.” (Not to mention the Geneva Conventions.) Rather than report their scruples to someone who might raise hell and put a stop to the systemic torture at Gitmo and other U.S. concentration camps–i.e., the public–FBI agents turned to the criminals. Just like Lichtblau did with domestic spying.

“When [one] agent mentioned [a torture] incident to the general [at Guantánamo], the general’s response…was ‘Thank you, gentlemen, but my boys know what they’re doing.'” Ultimately the FBI, worried that agents could be charged with war crimes if they continued to witness the torture by CIA operatives and mercenaries, pulled its employees out of Gitmo and other camps. No one called a Congressman. None called a press conference.

FBI agents kept quiet–even when the CIA frat-boy-style torture tactics screwed up their interrogations.

In 2003 one FBI agent had “begin building a rapport” with Yussef Mohammed Mubarak al-Shihri, a Saudi citizen. Al-Shihri told the agent that female CIA agents had “forced to listen to the ‘meow mix’ jingle for cat food for hours and had a women’s dress ‘draped’ on him.” As usual, the agent turned to the torturer. “The agent said he confronted a female military intelligence interrogator who admitted to ‘poaching’ his detainee, but there was little more the agent could do. Following the incident, al-Shihri became uncooperative, and the agent said he never bothered to tell his superiors about the military interrogator’s actions.”

Turning a blind eye to torture. Watching passively as CIA goons destroy the trust of a possible material witness to terrorism. What “mixed review”?

As usual, the Newspaper of Record’s worst sins in Gitmogate are those of omission–the really weird stuff that could deprive the Administration of its few remaining supporters. “Buried in a Department of Justice report,” reported ABC News, “are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantánamo and interrogate Chinese Uyghurs held there.”

Like their Tibetan neighbors, the Uyghurs of western China are victims of government oppression, including mass executions. Throughout the 1990s, U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia urged Uyghurs to revolt against Chinese occupation. After 9/11, however, the U.S. agreed to help China capture and torture Uyghur independence activists–as a quid pro quo for not using its U.N. veto to stop the American invasion of Afghanistan. (There’s more about the U.S. betrayal of the Uyghurs in my book “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

“Uyghur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators,” said ABC. “When Uyghur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment.”

It’s a tale bizarre enough to make Rush Limbaugh blush: intelligence agents from communist China invited to an American military base, where they’re allowed to torture political dissidents in American custody, with American soldiers as their sidekicks. In light of China’s crackdown on Tibet during the run-up to the Olympics, it’s a tasty news tidbit. But it didn’t run in The Times–as far as I can tell, it only ran in one newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.

At the same time journo-wimp Lichtblau was penning his “balanced” take on the Justice Department’s bombshell report, the U.S. government admitted that it has more than 500 children in its torture and concentration camps. More than 2,500 children have gone through U.S. secret prisons since 2002, including at least eight at Guantánamo.

I know a lot of right-wing conservatives. We don’t share much political common ground, but it’s hard to imagine any of them thinking the indefinite detention and torture of children, against whom there is no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing, is anything other than the behavior of a monster.

That’s the U.S. government, especially after 2001–criminal, corrupt and psychotic. But few Americans know the full extent of “their” government’s misdeeds, because state-controlled media chooses not to report them.

If a man screams in a government torture chamber, does he make a sound? Not if the only one who hears him is an American reporter.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Ted Rall Radio Interview

KBOO radio in Portland, Oregon will air an interview with me about everything from Art Spiegelman to Azerbaijan tomorrow, Tuesday, May 27, from 9:30 to 10:00 am Pacific (that’s West Coast!) time.KBOO’s live audio stream can be tuned in on the web (through iTunes or Abacast) at http://kboo.fm/listen

And there’ll be an extended webcast version of the show available on the KBOO website after the broadcast version airs. Just go to http://kboo.fm/WordsandPictures

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Propagandists First, Journalists Second

How the New York Times Won 2004 for Bush

Should the news media be patriotic? When a journalist uncovers a government secret, which comes first–national security or the public’s right to know?

In the United States, reporters consider themselves Americans first, journalists second. That means consulting the government before going public with a state secret. “When I was at ABC,” James Bamford told Time in 2006, “we always checked with the Administration in power when we thought we had something of concern, and there was usually some way to work it out.”

In a new book about the Bush Administration’s efforts to expand the president’s powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, the assumption that the press shouldn’t publish security-sensitive stories is so hard-wired that New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau accepts it as a given. But it’s a very American concept, and one that relies on the presumption that the U.S. government may make mistakes, but is largely a force for good. In other countries, the relationship between rulers and the press is strictly adversarial.

In “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice” Lichtblau unwittingly relates a depressing parable–his seeming obliviousness to conflict of interest is a bummer–describing the nation’s most prominent newspaper’s willingness to keep secrets for government officials, who turn out to be (shocker alert–>) lying. It’s a cautionary tale about journalistic nationalism, one of many (Judith Miller, anyone?) in which the Times transformed itself into Bush’s political slut.

A whore, at least, would have demanded money.

In 2004 Lichtblau and fellow Times reporter Jim Risen learned that the National Security Agency was spying domestically, on American citizens. The NSA, which uses sophisticated voice-recognition software and computer programs to intercept phone calls, fax transmissions, e-mail and even bank wire transfers, was supposed to limit its activities to foreign countries. Illegally expanding beyond its Congressionally-authorized mandate, Lichtblau writes, “the NSA had essentially gained access to the biggest telecom ‘switches’ in the country, using the agency’s data-mining technology to comb the huge trunks carrying massive volumes of traffic, in order to zero in on suspected dirty numbers and eavesdrop on them without warrants.”

It was a big story. Or it would have been, had the newspaper chosen to run it when it learned of it.

Naturally, it triggered alarms in official Washington when another Times reporter called the NSA for comment. Soon the agency’s director, General Michael Hayden, was calling the Times, asking it to censor itself. “Don’t run this story,” Administration honchos begged.

“The Times,” Lichtblau says, “had been through many contretemps in its long history over whether or not to publish newsworthy stories involving sensitive national security information and, despite the vitriolic charges from its critics, it was never a decision the paper made with reckless abandon. In more than a few cases, it has decided not to publish anything at all.”

Suckers.

For over a year, Lichtblau explains in an apparent attempt to justify himself and his employer to conservative critics, Times editors and reporters met repeatedly with White House officials to ask them why they shouldn’t spill the beans on the NSA’s domestic spying operation. That the program was illegal was pretty obvious. (Congress acknowledged as much by later voting to retroactively legalize it.) So was the lameness of the government’s argument against making the NSA’s activities public.

Declaring the Bush Administration “unpersuasive,” Lichtblau said: “To me, it was never clear what Osama bin Laden and his henchmen would learn–confirming, really–that the United States spy services were listening to them.” But the White House kept calling meetings, playing for time. Meanwhile, every morning, the Times came out without important news that its readers would care about–that their phone calls and e-mails were being monitored.

“Bush and ten senior advisors in the White House and the intelligence community would make personal pleas not to run the story in a series of meetings spanning 14 months, beginning in October of 2004 weeks before the presidential election,” Lichtblau says.
Weeks before the presidential election. You’d think the timing of the Administration’s pleas for self-censorship might have tipped off the Times’ editors that they were being used in order to ensure that Bush and the Republican Party won the election. Moreover, Lichtblau wrote, “We had reason to suspect that the White House was actively misleading us and that its impassioned pleas might have less to do with concern over national security harm than with the legal and political fallout that the story might trigger.” Gee, you think? And yet the paper’s editors refused to print it.

The Bush Administration, he argues, “had not yet suffered the kind of crippling body blows to its credibility that it would [by late 2005].” Yeah, well, not really.
Remember, this was late 2004. The U.S. had invaded Iraq in March 2003, a year and a half earlier, but the WMDs had never turned up. The paper’s own editorial page had been ranting on and on about the Administration’s perfidy. Credibility? What credibility? Besides, it wasn’t as if Bush was the first First Fibber. All presidents are serial liars. So are their subordinates. Why would the Times, or anyone else, believe them about anything?

As I read on, I kept thinking about an exchange I’d had with a fellow American reporter in Afghanistan in 2001. “Are you going to the press conference?” he asked me. A local warlord, part of the incoming Karzai regime, was about to give an update on the battle for Kunduz. “What for?” I asked him. “To get news,” he replied. “A press conference,” I shot back, “is the one place where you’re guaranteed not to learn anything. It is a vacuum-packed, perfectly news-free zone.” I spent the morning at the bazaar interviewing refugees, figuring they had less reason to lie than the Afghan official.

Anyway, the internal debate over whether to run the NSA domestic surveillance story came to an end in December 2005. Lichtblau, Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman and executive editor Bill Keller went to the White House, where they met with Condi Rice, General Hayden and a few other characters whom, if there’s any justice, will soon be in prison. This was followed by another rendezvous between the Big Dog himself, George W. Bush, and Taubman, Keller, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger. (Despite the obvious conflict of interest–readers who pay newspapers for the truth vs. government officials paid to lie–there’s no evidence that they considered refusing these meetings.) Deciding that they had been played long enough, Sulzberger and his lieutenants green-lit the piece.

By then, of course, Bush had won a second term. To some extent, he owed his victory to the “liberal” New York Times more than to Karl Rove. The Times, Extra! Magazine reported later, had also sat on another late-breaking “October Surprise” story that might have caused enough voters to change their minds to vote for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. That suspicious rectangular bulge in Bush’s jacket during his debate with Kerry, a NASA scientist who is an expert on such things had told the Times, was indeed an electronic transmitter that allowed Bush to receive remote coaching from Rove or someone else.

“A Times journalist, who said that Times staffers were ‘pretty upset’ about the killing of the story, claims the senior editors felt [it] was ‘too close’ to the election to run such a piece,” reported Extra!.

The government doesn’t tell the truth to reporters, even on “background.” Why shouldn’t the media tell the truth to the American people?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Silver Lining of Economic Collapse

Student Loans Crunch Starves Greedy Colleges

First came school vouchers, subsidizing private schools with public money. Now, as the economy contracts, the government faces mounting pressure to pour increasing amounts of our tax dollars into private colleges and universities as well.

The push comes from two fronts: a desire to make sure that student loans keep flowing in spite of the credit crunch, and to raise benefits for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are guaranteed an education under the GI Bill.

Student loans are a big segment of the banking industry, amounting to about $85 billion last year. Until recently, they were also hugely profitable. But the credit crunch has caused some lenders to pull out of the federal program. As a result, the pool of money for college loans available has fallen 13 percent.

Congress is considering various ways to make sure students can continue to borrow the money they need. The Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act of 2008 (ECASLA) would increase the amount lent directly by the government. Another Senate bill, supported by Bush, would let the government buy student loans from banks to free up capital for additional loans.

Other bills seek to make college more affordable for veterans, many of whom say they are getting screwed. “They were rather good at saying, ‘Join the Marines and get an education; you’ll have an opportunity to go to college,'” recalls Kevin Grafeld, 23, a part-time student from Long Island, New York. Despite serving five years in Iraq, he gets a mere $875 per month–not even enough to pay for the community college he attends as a part-time student. “I was 18 and a little naïve,” Grafeld told Newsday. A bill sponsored by Jim Webb of Virginia, a Democrat, would pay for tuition up to the cost of the most expensive public university in a veteran’s home state, plus room and board.

How much would these bills cost? It’s like Iraq: no one knows. Sponsors say the feds would actually come out ahead on ECASLA, earning a cool $450 million a year in interest and fees on the backs of college kids.

I have a better idea. Do nothing.

Student loans aren’t a solution to skyrocketing tuition. They’re its cause.
The economy may suck, but the last thing the nation’s colleges and universities need is more money. There are exceptions, but most are awash in cash.
It’s easy to see why: since 1980, tuition at private institutions has gone up at triple the rate of inflation, and twice the rate of people’s salaries. As Timothy Egan noted in The Times, “If the cost of milk had risen as fast as college since 1980…a gallon would be $15.”

Private schools, especially the elite, are getting an enviable return on their misbegotten windfall profits. Seventy-six colleges hold endowments over $1 billion. Harvard has $35 billion–more than the GDP of 100 of the world’s 179 nations.

Nationally, colleges got a 17.2 percent return on their investments in 2007–while spending a mere 4.6 percent of that tsunami of cash on their students.

Public schools are nearly as greedy. Over the last five years, they’ve hiked tuition 31 percent faster than inflation. According to the AP, it’s “the worst record on college prices of any five-year period covered by the survey dating back 30 years.”
Why do colleges raise tuition so much faster than the inflation rate? Because they can.

Since 1981, when President Reagan got rid of a financial aid system mostly based on grants (which don’t have to be repaid), easy credit on student loans has made it possible for any student to borrow as much as he or she needs–or, to put it another way, however much a college decides to charge. It’s simple supply and demand; with no downward pressure on tuition, the warlords of college have an overwhelming temptation to gouge.

And gouge they do.

No one seems to question the wisdom of lending tens of thousands of dollars at above-market compound interest rates to children whose employment history amounts to, at most, a year at Burger King. 17-year-old borrowers have no idea what they’re getting into; parents imagine (usually wrongly) that kids’ college degree will guarantee them high enough wages to pay it all off and then some.

The average college graduate comes out owing $24,200 in student loans. And that’s an average. Many owe more–much more–in a non-existent job market. Saddled with crushing monthly payments as high as a home mortgage in some areas, millions of young people are forced to move back home. According to a 2002 study for the student lender Nellie Mae, student loan debt forced 38 percent of college graduates to delay buying their first house, 14 percent to get married later, and 21 percent to wait until they’re older to have children.

Bankruptcy rates among young adults in their 20s are soaring, but default rates on student loans remain relatively low, under five percent. (Laws have been changed so that bankruptcy doesn’t relieve your obligation to repay student loans).
Students and taxpayers get poorer. Colleges get richer.

But what if the worst fears of the credit crunch worrywarts came to pass? What if the student loan system collapsed entirely?

For several years, few poor and middle-class kids would be able to afford college. To be sure, it would be a painful transition. Millions of kids would drop out, forced to defer their dreams. But it would be good in the long run–for the country and even for them.

College CEOs (let’s not call the heads of these mega-for-profit vampire capitalism firms mere “presidents”) who wanted their companies to survive would be forced to recognize the new market reality. They would streamline their operations and reduce wasteful spending so they could cut tuition and other expenses. As Harvard and other Ivy League schools have already begun to do, they’d dip into the hundreds of billions of dollars currently sitting idly and uselessly in endowment investment accounts. And tuition would drop.

The collapse of the student loan racket–banning them entirely would be ideal–could be one of the best results of the recession. But only if we let it happen.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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