Day: June 20, 2003

Greg Palast is Lying about Cynthia McKinney

Alternet.Org is featuring an article by Greg Palast, The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney, which engages in outright lies and distortions about what McKinney did or did not say about the Bush administration’s prior knowledge about the 9/11 attacks.

Palast cites several media accounts in which McKinney is described as having implied that the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks ahead of time. But Palast says that such claims were simply fabricated. For example, Palast writes of NPR,

Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?

According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s “a loose cannon” (media expert) who “the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted” (politician) by, and she is also “loony” and “dangerous” (senator from her own party).

Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.”

. . .

Problem is, McKinney never said it.

That’s right. The “quote” from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin’ made up.

The first bizarre thing about this is that Palast never actually cites any direct quotes attributed to McKinney, but then turns around and says that this quote that was not attributed to her is fabricated. Huh? If someone fabricated a quote and put it into McKinney’s mouth, it’s odd that Palast doesn’t once describe exactly what that fabricated quote was.

Second, that’s because Palast is a liar who is really the one playing games with quotes here. Notice that the only direct quote from the NPR broadcast about McKinney’s views on 9/11 is the paraphrase, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.” But here’s the transcript of the start of that June 16, 2002 broadcast,

JOSHUA LEVS reporting:

A couple of months ago, Congresswoman McKinney was on radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California. She said people close to President Bush, such as his father, could profit from the new war on terrorism. The senior George Bush sits on the board of The Carlyle Group, an investment firm that does hundreds of millions of dollars in defense-related business with the government.

(Soundbite of KPFA broadcast)

Representative CYNTHIA McKINNEY (Democrat, Georgia): And so we get this presidency of questionable legitimacy requesting a nearly unprecedented amount of money to go into a defense budget for defense spending that will directly benefit his father. Where are the brakes on transparency and corruption?

LEVS: McKinney implied that the administration knew in advance about September 11th and deliberately held back information.

(Soundbite of KPFA broadcast)

Rep. McKINNEY: What did this administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?

NPR did not fabricate anything — they included two soundbites that let McKinney speak for herself. Of course, those quotes from McKinney are nowhere to be found in Palast’s article. Why let the facts get in the way of a smear campaign?

Palast does a similarly deceitful hack job on the New York Times coverage of McKinney,

The New York Times’ Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.”

That’s loony, all right.

Palast then includes a transcript of an interview he did with Clemetson in which Clemetson is unable to cite a direct quote of McKinney back up her reporting. Palast then claims that this quote doesn’t exist “. . . in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her Website, nor in any of her radio talks.” In fact, here’s what McKinney said in a press release put out by her office and posted to her House web site shortly after her KPFA interview (emphasis added),

I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9-11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case. For example, it is known that President Bush’s father, through the Carlyle Group had – at the time of the attacks – joint business interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which, have soared since September 11.

On the other hand, what is undeniable is that corporations close to the Administration, have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11. The Carlyle Group, DynCorp, and Halliburton certainly stand out as companies close to this Administration. Secretary Rumsfeld maintained in a hearing before Congress that we can afford the new spending, even though the request for more defense spending is the highest increase in twenty years and the Pentagon has lost $2.3 trillion.

It is Clemetson who is correct and Palast who is doing a lousy job of reporting here. Doesn’t Alternet have anyone doing any fact checking or do they simply run any Left wing conspiracy theory that comes along?

Update: Palast apparently repeats this bogus claim in his book See No Evil. TomPaine.Com ran an excerpt from the book which included this,

She [McKinney] was labeled a traitor, a freak, a conspiracy nut and “a looney” — the latter by her state’s Democratic Senator, who led the mob in the political lynching of the uppity Black woman. The New York Times wrote, “She angered some Black voters by suggesting that President Bush might have known in advance about the September 11 attacks but had done nothing so his supporters could make money in war.” The fact that she said no such thing doesn’t matter; the Times is always more influential than the truth. Dan Rather had warned her, shut up, don’t ask questions, and you can avoid the neck-lacing. She didn’t and it cost her her seat in Congress.

Is Palast using Michael Moore as a ghostwriter by any chance?

Update #2: In his extensive research for his book, Palast also apparently missed this article by McKinney published in Counterpunch,

We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, delivered one such warning. Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before September 11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms’ stocks. What did this Administration know, and when did it know it about the events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?

Source:

Weekend All Things Considered. NPR, June 16, 2002.

The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney. Greg Palast, AlterNet, June 18, 2003.

Statement of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. April 12, 2002.

A Closer Look at the Rice Genome

Researchers at the University of Arizona and The Institute for Genomic Research have been taking a closer, detailed look at the rice genome and are finding some surprising results.

The rice genome was decoded in 2002, but that effort was essentially a rough draft that relied on automated processes to quickly sequence the DNA of rice. The work on the rice genome at The Institute for Genomic Research is more labor intensive laboratory-bases work. TGIR researcher C. Robin Buell compares the difference between the two as looking at the universe through an off-the-shelf telescope compared to looking at it with the Hubbell Telescope.

The latest look at the rice genome has focused on sequencing the smallest rice chromosome, chromosome 10, and discovered that it had twice as many genes as the initial rough draft indicated. Judith Plesset of the National Science Foundation said in a prepared statement that, “One of the lessons here is, ‘Don’t think you know everything simply because you’ve done the draft.'”

Researchers compared chromosome 10’s proteins to the proteins found in a mustard plant, Arabidopsis, whose genome has been completely sequenced. They found that about two-thirds of the proteins in chromosome 10 were also present in arabidopsis, indicating, according to a press release that,

. . . some of the specific genes responsible for enzyme production, binding of nucleic acids, cell growth and maintenance, cell communication, immunity, development and other functions and processes.

Researchers also found a stretch of heterochromatin on chromosome 10 — a compact string of DNA with few genes whose biological function remains unknown.

Japanese and Chinese research groups have largely finished sequencing chromosomes 1 and 4 respectively, and a full sequence of chromosome 3 is expected by the end of the year.

Source:

Going with the grain: A tale of rice’s smallest chromosome. Press Release, National Science Foundation, June 5, 2003.

Commonwealth to African Nations: Stop Changing Your Constitutions

Commonwealth Secretary General Donald McKinnon made a trip to Zambia recently where he stated the obvious — African states need to stop changing their constitutions so frequently or no one will take the documents seriously.

The Times of Zambia summarized his comments by writing,

. . . [Luskin said] that constitutions should not be changed for the sake of it but only when absolutely necessary.

. . .

He gave an example of the United States (US) constitution which has been in existence for over 200 years but had been amended only on a few occasions.

“The US constitution is a solid document that has been amended on a number of times and mainly it has been to fit into the modern times,” he said.

In fact sometimes it seems some developing nations have had more constitutions than the U.S. constitution has amendments (okay, that is an exaggeration but not by much).

A bigger problem is establishing a political culture that sees a constitution a document that is untouchable except in extreme situations, which has not always been easy to establish even in the United States (as prohibition certainly demonstrated). That requires political parties to subjugate their goals to a constitutional political process which can often be frustrating, rather than pursuing extra-constitutional solutions at the drop of a hat which seems to happen all too frequently in developing countries.

Source:

‘Club’ chief cautions Africa over constitutions. Times of Zambia, June 16, 2003.

Malaria Project Failing Due to Lack of Funds

An article published in the online Malaria Journal argues that the World Health Organization is woefully behind in its 1998 Roll Back Malaria plan that sought to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010 and then in half again by 2015. According to Harvard researchers Vasant Narasimhan and Amir Attaran, the RBM project has attracted barely five percent of the funds it needs to succeed.

Based on surveys of donor countries and external estimates of their spending, Narasimhan and Attaran estimate that RBM receives roughly US$98 million annually. It would need about US$1.5-$2 billion annually to reach its goal of halving malaria deaths.

The odd thing is that this estimate is filled with a bizarre level of uncertainty. Switzerland, for example, told the researchers that not only did they not know how much their country was giving for malaria control, but they did not even know how to go about finding out since malaria control spending was subsumed into larger health spending budgets. Narasimhan and Attaran write that this will pose enormous problems for funding of malaria control efforts,

In short, the Swiss answer, which seems likely to apply to some other donors too, is that the extent of malaria control funding is not just unknown, but actually unknowable. Leaving aside the reasons why this is true (e.g. it is found in integrated health programmes and not easily disaggregated), this poses a huge strategic threat to RBM’s goals: What is the likelihood of increasing malaria control funding, when the donors lack the accounting procedures and ability to know how much they are spending? Without reliable financial surveillance, there is good reason to suspect that aid to malaria control will stagnate, as it has done for decades, without triggering public pressure to demand improvement.

The other interesting thing is that the $98 million spending estimate is significantly smaller than other estimates that put annual malaria control spending at US$130 to $160 million. Part of the reason for the difference is that some organizations, including the World Bank, appear to be exaggerating their malaria control spending (emphasis added),

Although the Bank publicly claims that “at present, World Bank direct financing for malaria control activities is over $200 million in more than 25 countries”, we find on the Bank’s own project list only 10 countries having “active” malaria control projects [22]. In India, where in 1997 the Bank pledged its largest malaria control effort ($164.8 million), the project neared its close in 2003 after disbursing little over a quarter of this amount. In Africa, where 90% of malaria deaths occur, the Bank has only 4 active projects: in the Comoros, Eritrea, Madagascar, and Senegal. Yet not one of these countries suffers particularly intense or sustained malaria transmission – three are hardly malarious at all by African standards – meaning that the Bank’s efforts will contribute little to halving the burden of malaria.

Worst of all, the Bank has practically reneged on the dramatic pledge it made to two dozen African heads of state at Abuja in April 2000 to provide “up to $500 million more…for the fight against malaria in Africa” [23]. Nearly three years after that pledge, Eritrea is the only country to receive a new loan expressly including malaria control (the loan package is $40 million, split among 4 diseases). Assuming that the each disease in the Eritrea loan package receives an equal share, then the Bank’s new lending for malaria control since Abuja amounts to only $10 million; and three years after Abuja, up to $490 million of the $500 million that the Bank promised remains uncommitted and unspent. Furthermore, at this writing (December 2002), the Bank’s own malaria project list shows not one new African malaria control project in the planning pipeline. There seems to be no activity underway at the Bank to keep the promise that was made.

The authors recommend that the World Bank appoint a malaria “czar” to oversee malaria control projects in much the same way it appointed an AIDS “czar” to oversee AIDS control projects.

They also criticize views in Western donor nations that malaria spending is wasted because developing nations do not have the health care infrastructure to meaningfully absorb the aid. Instead, they argue that this is a sort of chicken-or-egg problem — additional spending on malaria would drive the creation of additional health care infrastructure. I suspect donor nations are a bit more skeptical than are Narasimhan and Attaran. As the authors themselves concede, the United States, for example, spent billions on malaria control in the 1960s with very little to show for it.

Source:

Roll Back Malaria? The scarcity of international aid for malaria control. Vasant Narasimhan and Amir Attaran, Malaria Journal, April 15, 2003.

Malaria project in funding crisis. BioMed Central, Press Release, April 25, 2003.