The Return on My Investment

By: Aaron Datesman

It's easy to recognize a win when it comes with a trophy at the end (or, in the case of politics, an inauguration). It's harder to recognize a win when somebody else gets the credit, and very often impossible when the win involves an undesirable outcome avoided. Although it's difficult to answer the question "What might have been?" this is exactly the context in which we ought properly to evaluate the results of our actions.

I was reminded of this recently when President Obama announced his support for strengthening Social Security, on June 2nd. Just a few years ago, the landscape was very different. Obama's 2014 budget contained Social Security cuts amounting to about 0.25 percentage points:

If the chained CPI were implemented, Social Security benefits would be about $3 per month lower in 2014, and about $30 a month lower by 2023, according to Congressional Budget Office calculations. And by 2033, Social Security payments are projected to be 3 percent lower than they would be using the current measure of inflation.

Senator Sanders led the charge to reject adoption of the chained CPI, going on to make strengthening Social Security a central theme of his presidential campaign:

Lawson’s organization [Social Security Works] has worked with lawmakers and other nonprofit organizations to oppose Obama’s proposed Social Security cuts and shift the conversation towards expansion. By the summer of 2014, a small group of Democratic caucus senators, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, started advocating for lifting Social Security’s payroll tax cap so wealthier people paid more into the system, and then increasing benefits to seniors. Polling by advocacy groups found broad support for expansion.

Two years later, here we are: Obama and Clinton, the presumptive nominee, are both on the record supporting Social Security expansion. One of them will get the win, but it's easy to make the case that Sanders deserves the credit. It's not provable, I suppose. Maybe I really want to believe it because I donated about $1000 to the Sanders campaign this primary season. My guy lost (or, properly, is going to lose), and maybe that was just money wasted.

But I don't believe that's so. In fact, I think I made a very smart investment. As if on cue, as it happens, I got an interesting letter in the mail the other day: my Social Security statement. It says on the front page

Your payment would be about $2442 a month at full retirement age.

The math is very easy to do. I'll be 45 years old this year, so we can use the figure of 3% lower in 2033 cited above with good accuracy. If the chained CPI had been implemented, my expected Social Security benefit would be lower by $879 per year. The net present value of that money is about $500.

So: Senator Sanders protected my Social Security benefits for the duration of my retirement. In exchange I donated an amount equal to two years' worth of the benefits that would have disappeared had the cut been implemented. I make out quite well! Now the program will be strengthened, and possibly benefits even increased. Of course, it's even better than this for me: I'm married, for one thing, so I'll share my wife's benefits. Also the same analysis extends to cover all of the people whom I love and care about (many of whom depend on Social Security, or will do so in the future).

I was lucky to be able to afford the money I donated (although it was a bit of a stretch). Actually this little calculation (based on a justifiable but unknowable assumption about where credit should go) was not the basis of my decision to donate to the Sanders campaign. But it makes me feel pretty good regardless. If I live to 85 years of age, I'll have something like $10,000 (2016 dollars) in additional retirement income thanks to Senator Sanders. This is a return of 10:1 (present day) on my $1000 in campaign donations.

When I first began to learn to look at the world in this way - by evaluating counter-factual situations ("What if the chained CPI had been implemented?") - I found my side winning a lot more battles than I had ever understood. I think it's a valuable lesson. Thank you, Bernie Sanders.

The Lighter Side of the Slaughter at Charlie Hebdo

There's not much funny about the massacre of twelve people in Paris yesterday. But it is genuinely funny, as well as completely predictable, that Marine Le Pen hopes to ride to power on their deaths.

Le Pen is the leader of France's far-right National Front, and came in third in the first round of the 2012 French presidential elections. She clearly plans to run for president again in 2017, and said today that "Islamists have declared war on France" and that "I want to offer the French a referendum on the death penalty."

What makes that funny is that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo despised Le Pen. Here's part of a recent interview with Jean Cabut, aka Cabu, who was murdered at age 76:

What made an impression on you in 2014?

Jihad and the progress of the National Front. Moreover, they meet in the extreme, it is hatred that connects them. For jihad, the scapegoat is the West, for the National Front, it is the Arabs: it is a common front, an inverted front. How to stop this?

Will you get to draw about this?

Yes, soon. I often do covers on Marine Le Pen... the National Front wants to restore the death penalty...This is very dangerous. We should use stupidity against itself, but how?

This is that section of the Cabu interview in French, please tell me if I translated anything incorrectly:

Qu’est-ce qui vous a marqué dans cette année 2014?

Le jihad et la progression du Front national. D’ailleurs, ils se rejoignent dans les extrêmes, c’est la haine qui les tient. Pour le jihad, le bouc émissaire, ce sont les Occidentaux, pour le Front National, ce sont les Arabes : c’est un front commun, un front renversé. Comment arrêter cela ?

Vous arrivez à dessiner sur ce sujet?

Oui, j’y arrive. Je fais souvent des couvertures sur Marine Le Pen car le Front national fait peur. C’est un parti attrape-tout. On dirait qu’il y a une fatalité. On entend l’opinion publique : on a tout essayé, il n’y a que cela qu’on n’a pas essayé. Même s’il n’en parle jamais, le Front national veut rétablir la peine de mort, le service militaire. C’est très dangereux. Il faudrait retourner la bêtise contre elle-même, mais comment ?

—Jon Schwarz

Report: Top Israeli Politician Naftali Bennett Played Key Role in 1996 Massacre That Motivated Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to Attack U.S. on 9/11

Naftali Bennett is Israel's Minister of the Economy and leader of the ultra-right wing religious party Jewish Home. He's also a leading candidate to be Israel's next Defense Minister, and as the New Yorker describes it, his ambition to one day become Prime Minister is "as plump and glaring as a harvest moon."

Now the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting that Bennett bears significant responsibility for Israel's 1996 massacre of 106 civilians taking shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon. According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Bennett – then an officer in an IDF commando unit – had contempt for his superiors' purported timidity in Israel's Operation Grapes of Wrath, and ignored orders in order to move more aggressively into Lebanon. His unit was then attacked by Hezbollah, and when Bennett called for help, the IDF responded with the shelling of the UN compound.

Members of the artillery battery itself said "no one spoke about it as if it were a mistake. We did our job...A few 'arabushim' [slur for Arabs] die, there is no harm in that." An Amnesty International investigation found that "the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear." Human Rights Watch reported that Israel had an "appalling willingness to conduct military operations in which civilians would bear the brunt of the suffering" and that its "claims that it had no knowledge that hundreds of civilians were sheltered at the Qana base are simply not credible." And the UN found "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors." (The U.S. was infuriated that Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then-Secretary General of the UN, published the UN investigation. Subsequently the UN Security Council voted 14-1 to appoint Boutros-Ghali to a second term; the one no vote was a veto from the U.S.)

But the Qana massacre got barely any attention from Americans, and to whatever degree anyone noticed it, they quickly forgot it had ever happened.

Not everyone forgot, however.

In Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war upon the U.S., he specifically cited Qana as part of his motivation:

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance...The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory.

Bin Laden cited Qana at least four more times: in a July, 1996 interview with Robert Fisk; a November, 1996 interview with a London newspaper; a 1999 interview with al Jazeera; and an October, 2001 online interview. He specifically said his goal was to make Americans "taste what we tasted."

In addition, Mohammed Atta signed a will at the beginning of Operation Grapes of Wrath. In Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower, he writes that "According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response."

Coincidentally, Naftali Bennett spent many years in living in the U.S. between his military service and the beginning of his Israeli political career. In 2000 he moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to work as as a software engineer and so his wife could work as a pastry chef making creme brûlée. Bennett apparently was living in New York on September 11, 2001.

—Jon Schwarz

Organizer of CIASavedLives.com Told CIA’s Most Blatant Lie about Iraq and WMD

This is extremely important information from the New York Times:

The ciasavedlives.com website was organized by Bill Harlow, the C.I.A.’s director of public affairs from 1997 to 2004, who still acts as a spokesman for George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director when the interrogation program began.

“Our concern is that right now people are reporting the Feinstein report as if it’s true,” Mr. Harlow said. “We don’t think it’s true.”

Bill Harlow told the CIA’s most blatant lie about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, just weeks before the U.S. invaded in March, 2003. Here’s what happened:

By the end of February, 2003, the U.S. case for war with Iraq was disintegrating. That February 15th had seen demonstrations of millions across the world in the biggest antiwar rallies in human history; the British parliament was showing signs it might vote against participating in the invasion; and most crucially, the UN had found no trace of WMD in Iraq.

At that point Newsweek published what was, to the Bush administration and CIA, the most terrifying story possible – that Iraq likely had no WMD, and the United States knew it.

What Newsweek revealed was that in 1995, when Hussein Kamel – Saddam’s son-in-law and head of Iraq’s WMD programs – had defected to Jordan, he told the UN, CIA and British intelligence that in fact Iraq had no WMD left.

According to Newsweek, "The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.” But the story quickly gained traction online, and when Reuters followed up on the Newsweek story, they went to Bill Harlow:

The CIA on Monday denied a Newsweek magazine report that Saddam Hussein's son-in-law told the U.S. intelligence agency in 1995 that Iraq after the Gulf War destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons and missiles to deliver them.

"It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said of the Newsweek report's allegations that Hussein Kamel told the CIA that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction.

Newsweek said Kamel, who headed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs for 10 years, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War.

"We've checked back and he didn't say this," a British government source told Reuters. "He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking."

Harlow of the CIA said: "Newsweek failed to ask us this question.”

There’s absolutely no ambiguity here; Harlow was lying through his teeth. He wasn’t addressing what Iraq was doing in 2003, or even whether what Hussein Kamel had said in 1995 was true. Rather, he was simply addressing what Kamel said, something that the CIA knew with 100% certainty.

But don't take my word for it. The notes from Kamel's debriefing are now online, and anyone with an internet connection can see for themselves:

Bill Harlow is a liar, and nothing he says should be believed.

P.S. It wasn't just Bill Harlow who lied about Hussein Kamel. Dick Cheney also lied about him in his biggest pre-war speech, claiming that Kamel had said that Saddam had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," when in fact Kamel had said exactly the opposite.

P.P.S. Weirdly, Harlow wrote a pretty good thriller in 1999 about terrorists trying to hijack a plane and crash it into the Knesset in Israel.

UPDATE: Newsweek has published a story about CIASavedLives.com which mentions Harlow: "The former CIA officials behind the site include Bill Harlow, a top CIA spokesperson during the George W. Bush administration..."

Unfortunately, there's so little institutional memory at media outlets now that there's no mention of the fact that Harlow lied about what should have been one of the most important stories in Newsweek's history.

“Gary Webb Is a Nut,” Said Washington Post Editor Jackson Diehl From Deep Inside His Bizarre Fantasy World

Jefferson Morley was a reporter at the Washington Post in 1996 when the San Jose Mercury News published Gary Webb’s series about the how the CIA protected cocaine traffickers who were helping fund the contras. Here’s what Morley says about the reaction of Jackson Diehl, then the Washington Post’s Foreign Editor and now a columnist there as well as its Deputy Editorial Page Editor:

By the mid-1990s, the Washington Post’s senior editors had stopped questioning the veracity of senior CIA officials. They assumed it…On Gary Webb’s story, they preferred to trust the CIA...

Given the choice of trusting a senior CIA source or taking a chance on a reporter from a first-rate, second-tier newspaper like the San Jose Mercury News, no editor who wanted to get ahead and stay ahead would hesitate.

“Webb is a nut,” Jackson Diehl assured me, shaking his head. “The things some people will put in print.”

Here’s what Diehl put in print about Iraq and WMD on December 30, 2002:

As sanctions on Iraq crumbled, it became more and more obvious that Saddam Hussein had not been contained: He had developed new weapons – drone aircraft and longer-range missiles – and was aggressively hunting for nuclear materials...

By that account, the conflicts that will shape this difficult winter of 2003 were mostly inevitable. It's just that, as half a century ago, Americans were slow to understand the threat, and reluctant to take it on -- until inaction seemed the worst choice.

Diehl also wrote that an invasion of Iraq, done right, would "catalyze a long-overdue liberalization of the Middle East."

There's a direct line from the catastrophic failure of the Washington Post, New York Times, etc. on Gary Webb and the contra-cocaine story to the catastrophic failure of the Washington Post, New York Times, etc. six years later on Iraq and WMD. Not only did it happen for the same reasons, it often involved the exact same people.

It would scary if Jackson Diehl had some idea about what were going here on Planet Earth and were straightforwardly lying about it. But it’s much scarier that he actually appears to believe his weird delusions – and that the Washington Post wants to reward him for them. (Diehl still has his fancy job at the Washington Post. Jefferson Morley does not have a job there at all.)

—Jon Schwarz