Sovereignty?

sovereignty :: supreme power especially over a body politic : freedom from external control : autonomy

From Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes:

Let's sum up the transfer of sovereignty. The United States keeps 14 military bases, at least 130,000 troops. It also keeps control of the new Iraqi military (which is to be under the command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez). It keeps control of the purse-strings. UN Security Council Resolution 1483 gives the United States (the "coalition") total control over Iraq's oil revenue -- it goes into a bank account labeled the Iraq Development Fund administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority.

So, the new sovereign government of Iraq will have a military controlled by a foreign power, will be occupied by a foreign military, will have no revenues, and "will not need law-making authority." An interesting definition of sovereignty.

It should be fairly clear what this sham is all about. Once they claim hard enough the government is sovereign, then, without needing to make laws, it can sign binding contracts with foreign corporations. And, just by the way, Bush can claim before the elections that he's created a sovereign government in Iraq.

But in the Washington Post article,

Brahimi joined Negroponte in trying to play down expectations that the provisional government will exercise the full range of authority that a subsequent elected government will wield. He said the interim leaders should be mindful that they have not been "democratically elected" and that they should refrain from "entering into long-term commitments." [italics is mine]

It will be interesting to watch over the next few months if the interim leaders are indeed "mindful", or if U.S. energy corporations get long term contracts. Or even if they don't get the long term contracts initially, they will be in good position to get them in the future. This has me wondering again to what extent this war was pushed because of oil, and it has me going back to December 2003 when Wolfowitz decided that France, Germany, and Russia were barred from the rebuilding contracts:

It is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States to limit competition for the prime contracts of these procurements to companies from the United States, Iraq, Coalition partners and force contributing nations. Thus, it is clearly in the public interest to limit prime contracts to companies from these countries.

Although I suspect that those countries wouldn't have received any contracts even if they weren't officially barred, it still raises the question of why they were. The smaller the competition for the contracts, the higher the winning bid will be, which is not in Iraq's interest, and not in the U.S. taxpayers interest in that sense as well. So while it may benefit the U.S. companies, and hence at least part of the U.S. "public", it may not be the best for the Iraqis.

Josh Marshall wasn't sure of the real reason of this, Kevin Drum thought the U.S. was just being bitter, and Andrew said that we had to teach France a lesson.

It seems to me that this is a good reason for nation building to be done by the United Nations.

And what are "essential security interests of the United States", anyway? Are they U.S. troops? WMD? Oil? And who - or what - do they need protection from?

Fellow bloggers?

Thoughts on the Sept. 11th Commission

by Gerasimos Karavitis and Dan Skinner

In light of the President’s peculiar stance toward the September 11 Commission, we wish to put forth a small collection of hypotheses and questions about the content of the controversial August 6 PDB, the meaning of the president’s refusal to testify under oath, and the standards of “precision” that the president has employed in addressing issues of national security. We believe that if the September 11 Commission is fully committed to executing its putative tasks, it will in time demonstrate that—among other things—it has thoroughly explored the following avenues of inquiry.

What is the purpose of a PDB? How does it function?

One would assume that the method of constructing important briefing memos such as the August 6 PDB is not left entirely to the literary and semantic preferences of their authors. It seems reasonable, that is, to assume that there is an instituted method for the construction of such memos, a method whose end is to minimize the possibility of miscommunication between their authors and their intended reader—i.e. the President. Moreover, if this method is to achieve its end, it must be predicated upon—at least—the following two, related parameters. First, it must require that PDBs are authored with two specific standards in mind: a standard of consistency (whereby the same word does not have different meanings at different instances), and a standard of specificity (whereby the meaning of words is not arbitrary within a single interpretative moment). Secondly, in order for these standards to be met consistently by the authors of the PDBs, the structure and word choices involved in the construction of each PDB must in some way be codified—if not in a separate text exclusively dedicated to their codification (i.e. a manual of some sort), then through their repeated use. Summarily, it seems reasonable to suppose that the normally subjective aspects of spoken language are highly circumscribed in intelligence reports in order to ensure a reliable basis upon which expectations of meaning could be formed.

Moreover, if one were to assume that these hypotheses are verifiable, one would inevitably develop a particular expectation. Specifically, one would come to expect that when a phrase like “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” appears on a document that only the president is directly authorized to read, the phrase must have a different meaning and directive weight for the president than it would for an ordinary citizen replicating the phrase in an everyday conversation. If, in other words, a communicative code does in fact exist between the authors of the PDBs and the president, then we must conclude that the authors of the PDBs choose their words and phrases with a knowledge of the possible meanings that these words and phrases have and, consequently, that the president (as reader of the PDBs) is obliged to apprehend these words and phrases in the context of their assigned possible meanings.

And it is reasonable, we contend, to hold our hypotheses as verifiable. For the process of communicating with a figure of supreme political authority—such as the president of the US—through official documents may safely be understood as a distinct professional discipline, and, just as each professional discipline has its own instituted vocabulary and set of inveterate discursive practices through which its communicative domain is demarcated and animated, so the discipline of communicating with a president through official documents must have its own instituted vocabulary and set of inveterate discursive practices.

Consequently, we are inclined to ask: how can our president claim that he did not act more decisively on the August 6 PDB because its contents (phrases like “determined to strike America” and “patterns of suspicious activity”) were not “specific” enough? The communicative institutions by which his reading of the PDBs is conditioned function to prevent the possibility that he reads and understands these phrases as would an ordinary citizen. And even if the president did read and understand the crucial phrases on the August 6 memo as an ordinary citizen would, then he did not read and understand them as a president should. Thus, his explanation of why he remained passive after reading the August 6 memo seems quite untenable.

Why did the President refuse to testify under oath?

How can we understand the President’s refusal to testify under oath? If the President has nothing to hide, then the whole question of testifying under oath would be irrelevant: he would simply testify under oath. To take an oath is to commit to some variation of the conjunction “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The refusal to testify under oath implies, then, a commitment to the negation of the conjunction, or a commitment to the sentence: “I do not swear to tell the truth, nor do I swear to tell the whole true, nor do I swear to not say something that might not be the truth.” Essentially, then, the choice of not testifying under oath is a choice which disjoins honesty from testament and, by extension, truth from justice. The refusal to testify under oath can only be interpreted as the choice made by one who fears incriminating him- or herself by the things he or she might say.

Given the premise that the President indeed has something to hide, we may proceed to consider his possible choices, the likely consequences of each, and the logic behind his decision to not testify under oath. Prior to the moment of his choosing to not testify under oath, the president had two options. The first was to testify under oath and not tell the truth (i.e. the information that he wants to conceal, which might either be a euphemistic variation of “I didn’t feel a sense of urgency” or something more specific and cacophonous). The second option was to not testify under oath and to not tell the truth. The first option could have, in theory, yielded higher rewards, but it was also riskier. The political benefit that could have accrued from choosing it would be in assuring people that the president is not afraid of the truth. However, its inherent risk was that, if it were to be discovered at some point in the near future that the president’s responses were untruthful, he and the ensemble he leads could not avoid accusations of perjury as the nation enters pre-electoral high season.

Being that they are conservatives, it comes at no surprise then that the President’s advisors chose to reason conservatively—to risk less in case the truth should come out—and choose option two. This decision allows the president to retain his faith in a November victory even in the event that things do go awry during his testimony to the September 11 Commission. (Incidentally, if Clinton had reasoned conservatively when first asked about the Lewinski affair and admitted that he engaged in sexual activity with her—instead of attempting to evade all political costs through an acrobatic deception—his trial and the negative implications that his trial had on the institution of the American presidency would not have ensued.)

The logic of security and the problem of specificity

The pretense for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that—in conjunction with Hussein’s inimical attitude toward the United States—this constituted a casus belli. Of course, at the time of their report to the United Nations, UN weapons inspectors stated that they had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nonetheless, the president decided to proceed with the invasion.

When later asked about the missing WMDs, the President claimed that more precise information was not necessary to justify the invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, when asked to explain his reaction to the August 6 PDB—which warned, however tepidly in the President’s eyes, of the possibility that attacks would be carried out on American soil—the President claimed that there was not enough specific information for him to take more active measures toward defending the nation from of a terrorist attack in the weeks prior to September 11.

We cannot help but wonder: does the logic of security—an essentially conservative logic, since it proceeds, above all, on the principle of minimizing loss—not dictate that the statesmen of a country have more reason to act on the basis of less evidence when it comes to orchestrating a defensive operation within the country than they do when orchestrating an operation outside of it, regardless of whether the latter is defensive or offensive in its nature?

Note: Updated April 30. Published in The Advocate.

What are they thinking?

Here are the old Iraqi flag and the Israeli flag

And here are several Arab flags along with the new Iraqi flag selected by the U.S. appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Can you tell which one it is?

Josh Marshall:

The Associated Press gets it pretty much right when it says, "The new design not only abandons the symbols of Saddam's regime. It also avoids the colors used in other Arab flags: green and black for Islam and red for Arab nationalism."

But, really, why would we worry about that, since Islam and nationalism don't seem to have very big audiences over there anyway?

Pictures of War

Strange thing, this war is, and especially in America. Many Americans seem willing to back spurious presidential war efforts and "support the troops" so long as images of the effects of war don't make it home. As we've seen in several wars past - Viet Nam and Somalia especially - images may be the only way not to prolong stupid decisions and to jar the public back into their senses. This week was interesting on this front as images of flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force base were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Memory Hole. One, taken by a contractor who has since been fired for the photograph, appeared on the front page of The Seattle Times.

The Memory Hole deserves a lot of credit, and a lot of publicity, for their committment to putting information and images on the web that the government doesn't want us to see. We especially need to see images of death, which burn reality into our brains, however diffcult some of them may be to take. We should be seeing photos of the horrors from Iraq as often as those planes flying into the Twin Towers, but remind ourselves that one was done to "us" and the other "we" did.

There is no such thing as a clean war, unless of course you simply decide not to calculate civilian casualties and instead package the war at home in cute little yellow ribbons on trees. While the US has done a shit job in Iraq, it has done a great job (at least until now) desensitizing Americans to the atrocities this country is committing abroad. I'm more worried about the implications of the latter since, while we can always get out of Iraq, there are always more Iraqs around the corner.

Earth Day (Week)

We shouldn't let Earth Day sneak by without a few enviro posts.

What's the size of your ecological footprint? It's interesting, check it out.

Also, this week from Andrew Sullivan:

This is also a good moment to plug Matthew Scully's beautifully argued and gut-wrenching book, "Dominion," on the enormous harm we are doing to the animals we own and control.

I'm only half-way through it, but it's a powerful book, and it's good to see the issue being raised by conservatives such as Matthew Scully, who is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

The Cost of War

This web site allows users to generate comparative figures of the cost of the Iraq war and various domestic programs. It's pretty interesting for a number of reasons, if only because the numbers they're using come from the Congressional Budget Office, which I didn't realize had a clue what was going on. It also lets users look at the cost in terms of their own state and county's contribution.

Political Words, Political Games

Let’s be honest: The Right has won the American language war, and the Left has helped them do it. From “Partial Birth Abortion,” the “Death Tax” and the “Patriot Act” to the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate, the Left has been arguing on a linguistic terrain constructed and continually redefined by the Right.

The problem with this is simple: there is no way to win a debate in which one is confined to another’s words when language is the central battlefield of politics. The side that is able to define the terms and control the images that present politics to the public is the side that is likely to win.

Read full article.

Partisan Dim Sum

It seems like a prevalent theme in politics that those who attain power will use it primarily in pursuit of keeping it, and only secondarily in pursuit of whatever goals those who gave it to them had in mind. With both the Democratic and Republican parties in such idealistic disarray these days, it makes me wonder what function these partisan delineations are really serving, beyond keeping their stranglehold on the American political system. The Republican Party, as represented by George W., is not even attempting to link itself idealistically with the basic tenets of political conservatism (i.e. small government, fiscal responsibility), and as we have all been lamenting since Clinton took off (with dishes in the sink and dirty laundry strewn all over the floor), the Democrats have no direction to speak of. So why is everyone so bogged down by trying to affiliate?

The people at lyinginponds.com are making a concerted effort to keep track of the partisanship of the mainstream media, which seems like a noble enough endeavor, but what I'd really like to see is a breakdown according to the fundamental ideals, a la carte. For example, can someone show me a smart person arguing in favor of A. George W. in general, or B. the American endeavor in Iraq, as it stands now?

The Republican Fundraising Myth

Although the media have been reporting that Bush is blowing away Kerry in fundraising, The Hill is reporting that it is the Democrats who are doing the blowing, if only by exploiting soft money loopholes in campaign finance laws. Perhaps most interestingly, the article quotes Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, as saying that “MoveOn.org is a huge threat and has hurt the president. Every action makes a difference.”

Tax Cuts: Rhetoric versus Reality

One thing that always struck me about the endless debate over who benefits the most from Bush's tax cuts is that, at the end of the day, the arguments don't really matter. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that, come tax day, they don't matter. Whichever set of statistics you believed when the tax cuts were passed, on April 15 you'll know exactly how much you benefited from them. Perhaps not surprisingly, Americans are coming to the conclusion that those tax cuts may have benefited the rich more after all.

According to this AP survey (link via Daily Kos), 49 percent of Americans feel their overall tax burden has increased. Perhaps more strikingly, only 13 percent think their taxes have gone down. Of course, a good part of that perception comes from the fact that State and local taxes have increased over the past few years. 25 percent of respondents believe their Federal taxes have gone up, but 43 percent say their tax burden has stayed the same.

The most frightening statistics for the Bush administration, though, have got to be these:

• 61 percent of respondents believe balancing the budget is more important than tax cuts, compared to 36 percent who believe the opposite
• 53 percent support the elimination of tax cuts for anyone earning more than $200,000 a year

Hmm. I wonder which Presidential candidate's policies better match those two items.

Bush Contradicts Self at Own Press Conference

An observation from The Daily Misleader:

During [this week's] prime time press conference, President Bush once again claimed that "there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings". But just minutes later at the same press conference the president proved he was not telling the truth.

Specifically, Bush said the reason he supposedly requested intelligence briefings before 9/11 "had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" in 2001. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings.

Russian Firm Evacuates 370

According to The Age, Russia's biggest contractor in Iraq is evacuating all its 370 staff from the country after at least 40 civilians being taken hostage.

Howard Stern: King of All Swing Voters?

An article in the Dallas Morning News last week made some interesting points about the potential impact Howard Stern could have on the presidential election.

"Talk radio heavyweights Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are preaching to the converted, [media experts] said. Mr. Stern has 8.5 million potential swing voters tuned in, and his loyal listeners have shown a willingness to do stunts far more outlandish than going to the polls at the shock jock's urging."

and then the most interesting reason why Stern might matter...

"But the fact that Mr. Stern's fans aren't seeking political rhetoric could be the very reason they listen to his anti-Republican riffs, said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of the industry magazine Talkers.

"'When every day you're doing politics, and you have an agenda, people expect it,' he said. 'It doesn't have as much influence as a trusted person who is so moved to speak out that he breaks his own format.'

"Mr. Stern offers only faint praise for Democrat John Kerry but says that the Massachusetts senator must be better than the status quo. "My audience is the swing vote," he told his listeners Friday."

I thought about this when Air America Radio was launched last week. I'm not sure that a leftist radio station will change the calculus much. But John Stewart, Howard Stern and a few others who can slip politics unsuspectingly in between fart jokes may have the greatest impact on the undecided voter.

Oh yeah, and the best part about the Morning News's article? They're afraid to print the word "ass": "I'm hearing from hard-core Republicans who can't wait to vote Bush's [rear end] out," Mr. Stern said during his show recently.

Funding the 9/11 Commission

Since many people seem to understand politics better in numbers, check out this nice little contrast from The Nation's Matt Bivens: "When Republicans were after Bill Clinton, they saw fit to allocate $70 million to look into this one man's business dealings and sexual escapades; the 9/11 commission, by contrast, has had to beg and scrape from the Administration to gather a budget of $15 million."

Anyone got a calculator handy? I'm not sure 'bout this one.

Wrongful Conviction based on a False Confession?

Marty Tankleff had just turned 17 years old when his parents were brutally murdered. Having been the only other person in the house that morning, and with no sign of forced entry, the detectives quickly zeroed in on Marty. After a 5 hour interview/interrogation, Marty confessed. Although he immediately recanted and claimed his innocence, he was convicted and has served 13 years of his 50 year sentence.

I've gotten to know Marty and his case by writing him, visiting him, and watching a videotape of the original trial. I think he got a raw deal. In a recent development in the case, a man has admitted to being the get-away driver for the murder and has implicated two other men who were associates of Marty's father's business partner. CBS will tell Marty's story on 48 Hours Investigates this Wednesday April 7 at 10pm. Of course the district attorney is still fighting this every step of the way.

read more below, including the New York Times article in Sunday's paper

Briefly, Marty's innocence is supported by lack of a serious motive, no history of violence, and the fact that he actually called 911 and gave first aid to his father when he found him gagging and soaked in blood (his father never regained consciousness and died in the hospital a few weeks later). Marty's confession is not supported by the physical evidence. He said that he awoke at 6 am and killed them, but the EMT said it would have been earlier. Marty also said he killed his mother first, but the father's blood was found in her room indicating that he was killed first. And he gave an elaborate scheme of which weapons he used and how he cleaned them off afterwards - none of which is supported by the physical evidence.

The authorities admitted that they never considered the business partner Jerry Steuerman a suspect, even though he was the last one at the house the night before the attacks, at 3:30 am, following a high stakes poker game. (I don't think he personally committed the murders, but rather there is evidence that it was his associates.) The first thing that Marty said to them when they arrived on the scene was that Steuerman was behind the attacks. The relationship between Marty's father and Steuerman had recently 'deteriorated', and Marty's father was about to call in his loans on Steuerman, who owed the senior Tankleff hundreds of thousands of dollars. When warned by a friend just a few days before the attacks about doing this, Marty's father said that he 'knew where the bones were buried'. I don't know what he was referring to, but it certainly sounds serious. In the week following the murder, Steuerman faked his own death, withdrew thousands of dollars from a joint bank account he had with the senior Tankleff, shaved his beard, dyed his hair, and fled to California where he was living under an alias. The police tracked him down so he could answer some questions, and told him to come back to New York because he was making their case against Marty look bad. (I'm not kidding.) Steuerman also reportedly had previously hired members of a motorcycle gang to beat up a former business partner. One of Steuerman's associates, Joseph Creedon, who has now been implicated in the murder independently by two sources, previously stated to police that Steuerman's son said to him that Steuerman had wanted to hire him to cut out Marty's tongue (prior to trial) because Marty was talking too much. Creedon said he was shot in the arm by Steuerman's son for refusing.

Despite this evidence, the district attorney and the courts believe Marty's confession. There is no audio or video record of the interrogation or confession, which are now standard in a couple of states and countries. In the last few years, DNA testing has provided irrefutable examples of false confessions, such as in the Central Park Jogger case in which several teenage boys falsely confessed, and in many other cases won by the Innocence Project. I'm not sure how much more evidence can be discovered in Marty's case. To get a new trial, he needs the court to recognize his statements as a false confession.

New York Times article:

Convicted of Killing His Parents, but Calling a Detective the Real Bad Guy

April 4, 2004
By BRUCE LAMBERT

K. James McCready, a veteran Suffolk County homicide detective, was off duty the morning of Sept. 7, 1988, when his beeper summoned him to a murder scene at a luxury waterfront home in Belle Terre.

Inside was a gruesome sight. Arlene Tankleff had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death. Her brutally wounded husband, Seymour, was unconscious and died weeks later in a hospital.

Within hours of surveying the scene, Detective McCready declared the case solved. He singled out the couple's son, Martin, 17, as the prime suspect. In a long interrogation that day, the detective later boasted, he used deception to trick him into confessing.

But Mr. Tankleff promptly disavowed the confession, refusing to sign it, and the physical evidence did not implicate him. Yet he was convicted in 1990, based on the statement extracted by Detective McCready and his testimony as the star prosecution witness at the trial.

The tough-talking Mr. McCready voices pride in outwitting the youth. "I used trickery and deceit," he said. Lying to a suspect is legal, and he remains adamant about Mr. Tankleff's guilt. "I don't think he did it. I know he did
it."

Imprisoned for 50 years to life, Mr. Tankleff insists he is innocent. He accused Mr. McCready of ignoring an obvious suspect: the slain father's estranged business partner, who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and was in the house that night for a high-stakes poker game.

But the conviction withstood numerous legal appeals, even to the United States Supreme Court, though some decisions were sharply divided.

Hoping anew to win Mr. Tankleff's freedom, his lawyers are back in court, this time with evidence from a man who says he was the getaway driver who took two accomplices to the Tankleff house that night. But the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, says that justice was done and opposes the challenge.

Mr. McCready shrugs off criticism. If the verdicts are overturned, he says, he is ready for a retrial. "It won't change the testimony," he said recently in South Carolina, where he retired. "It won't change the evidence." As for discrepancies in the case, he said, "Wouldn't it be great to have every murder open and shut?"

Despite the passing of time, the case has drawn growing national attention from lawyers, judges, investigators, scholars, journalists, crime buffs and critics of the system. Some professors teach it as a textbook case of the law gone tragically awry.

Core questions haunt the case: did Mr. Tankleff do it? If so, why? If not, how was he convicted - and who is the real killer?

Critics of the conviction have often focused on the conduct of Mr. McCready, an alumnus of a scandalous period in Suffolk law enforcement who has a checkered reputation on and off the job.

"He's the heart and soul of why this case is rotten to the core," said Mr. Tankleff's lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb. "Any investigation of this case is by definition an investigation of James McCready."

A state inquiry concluded that Mr. McCready perjured himself in another murder case. During the Tankleff trial he befriended Martin Tankleff's half sister, the only relative to turn against him, and later opened a business with her husband.

Later, Mr. McCready was prosecuted on an assault charge but was acquitted. In one of several odd coincidences, his defense lawyer was Mr. Spota, now the district attorney opposed to reopening the Tankleff case.

While the campaign to free Mr. Tankleff focuses on new evidence, it is difficult to separate his case - and Mr. McCready - from their origins in a notorious era.

"This case reflects everything that was rotten about the system," said Mr. Gottlieb. "It was a misnomer to call it a criminal justice system."

The Suffolk County system that prosecuted Mr. Tankleff was under attack from many quarters as inept and even corrupt. Critics accused the district attorney's office and Police Department of tolerating gross misconduct and lawbreaking.

A State Investigation Commission report in 1989 found that the authorities had botched major cases - even enabling murderers to get off - by coercing false confessions, brutalizing suspects, illegally tapping phones, lying on the witness stand, engaging in cover-ups and ignoring, losing or faking crucial evidence.

One innocent 17-year-old - the same age as Mr. Tankleff at the time of his arrest - was suspected of rape. The police beat him, threatened to kill him, fired a shotgun nearby and shoved a gun in his mouth, the commission report said.
The panel's chairman, David G. Trager, said at the time that Suffolk was known as the Wild West of New York. A Pace University law professor, Bennett Gershman, said: "People used to joke about Suffolk. They were notorious."

Among those the report cited was Mr. McCready. It said he perjured himself in a 1985 murder trial by "knowingly giving false testimony." While the report said wrongdoers were rarely penalized, Mr. McCready disputed the perjury accusation and noted that he was never disciplined or prosecuted.

An Immediate Suspect

From the moment he arrived at the Tankleff home, Detective McCready says, he suspected the son.

With no sign of a break-in and no valuables missing, robbery was ruled out. The son, who said he woke up to find the carnage and called 911, was unscathed. "Why was he still alive?" Mr. McCready wondered.

His first impression of the youth reinforced the hunch. Mr. McCready said that when he first saw Mr. Tankleff, he was sitting quietly, hands clasped over one knee. "That will always stick in my mind," he said. "The kid just didn't have any emotion - totally not understandable by me. When I approached him, the first thing out of his mouth was, 'I know who did it.' "

Mr. Tankleff accused his father's partner, Jerard Steuerman, as having motive and access. He quarreled over his debts and was the last poker player to leave that night, the teenager said. But the son's premise seemed too pat, Mr. McCready said. "It was too calm, cool and collected," he said. "He wasn't even expressing anger towards Jerry."

But Mr. Tankleff's relatives - the brother and sisters of his slain parents - say that his placid exterior in public is a lifelong trait. At the trial, he showed no emotion until the verdict, when he sobbed.

In hours of questioning, Mr. McCready accused the youth of the attack. He denied it and even asked to take a polygraph test, an offer that was declined. Later, he arranged to take one and says he passed.

Then the detective hit on a ploy and pretended to call the hospital. "I was trying to figure out some way to get him over the edge," he said. "I made up that lie that his father came out of the coma" and named his son as the assailant. In fact, the father never woke up.

The youth cracked. Under duress, suggestive questioning and badgering, he says, he wondered aloud if he was deluded or had a dual personality and could have committed the killings and blocked the memory. Prodded, he said, he imagined how he might have done it.

Mr. McCready said, however, that it was more than the boy's imaginings, but that it was an actual confession to the killings, motivated by a number of grievances against his parents. He even gave two different versions of how he did it, Mr. McCready said.

The detective jotted his notes of the interrogation on a pad. But he never finished; he was interrupted midsentence when the Tankleff family lawyer intervened. The partial statement was never signed, and Mr. Tankleff promptly disavowed it. The interrogation was not taped.

As for physical evidence, Mr. Tankleff bore no scratches or bruises and, despite the savagery, had no blood or skin under his nails. The alleged weapons, a kitchen knife and dumbbell, were clean. Medical experts said the blows had come from a hammer.

As the father clung to life with a chance of waking, a remarkable episode occurred. Mr. Steuerman faked his own death and fled to California, shaving his beard and adopting an alias. Mr. McCready tracked him down and returned him, not as a suspect but as a prosecution witness who had been at the Tankleff house. Mr. Steuerman, a bagel shop owner, said he had fled because of mounting personal problems.

Mr. Steuerman was not given a polygraph test. He vehemently denied guilt, saying he had left before the mayhem. "He couldn't hurt a fly," Mr. McCready said. Nor would killing the partner make sense, he said, because that "doesn't make the debt go away."

But the executor of the $3 million estate, Ron Falbee, said he found on Seymour Tankleff's desk a blood-spattered copy of a letter demanding that Mr. Steuerman pay up. "I was amazed the police didn't take it as evidence," he said.
After the murders, he said, Mr. Steuerman stopped paying, though he later made a settlement.

Years of Questions

"I didn't convict him," Mr. McCready said. "Twelve jurors did."

The trial got off to a rocky start. The defense lawyer, Mr. Gottlieb, was about to run for district attorney as a Democrat and wanted the judge, Alfred C. Tisch, who was mulling running as a Republican, to disqualify himself. But he refused and "was unfair from Day 1," Mr. Gottlieb said. Mr. Tisch declined to comment.

In the end, the disputed confession swayed the jury. The nagging question, as Mr. McCready says, was: "Would you ever admit to something you didn't do?"

The concept of false confession was little known then, though modern DNA evidence has since proved it can happen, as in the Central Park jogger case. A Fordham University law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, said, "Even today,
people have a hard time believing it."

Lawyers hired by Mr. Tankleff's relatives uncovered intriguing evidence over the years, cited in their appeals, that casts doubt on Mr. McCready's version. The common thread is Joseph Creedon, a criminal known as Joey Guns who was acquainted with Mr. Steuerman.

While Mr. Tankleff awaited trial, Mr. Creedon told the police that he had been pressured by Mr. Steuerman through his son, Todd, to cut out Mr. Tankleff's tongue. When Mr. Creedon refused, Todd shot him in the arm, Mr. Creedon said in a statement to the police. Todd Steuerman has denied shooting Mr. Creedon, and the police took no action.

A few years later, a woman signed a statement that Mr. Creedon claimed he had been involved in the murders with a "Steuerman."

The new appeal is based on another witness who places Mr. Creedon at the scene. Glenn Harris, an ex-convict, says he drove Mr. Creedon and another man to and from the Tankleff house, supposedly for a burglary. Mr. Harris, who later heard on the news what had happened, said in a statement, "This has bothered me for a long time."

Jay Salpeter, a retired New York City homicide detective who found Mr. Harris, said he passed a polygraph test and had nothing to gain by implicating himself. Mr. Creedon has denied involvement.

Detective McCready's role extended beyond his testimony.

He befriended Mr. Tankleff's half sister, Shari Rother, and during the trial gave interviews to reporters about her shift against him. Jurors were not supposed to find out, but one said they did.

Mr. Falbee, the executor of the will, said that the will gave most of the money to Martin, but because it is illegal to benefit from crime, the conviction shifted his share to Ms. Rother. She did not return calls for comment.

After the trial, Mr. McCready raised eyebrows by joining Ms. Rother's husband as a partner in Digger O'Dell's bar and restaurant, near the Riverhead courthouse. "It was unseemly," Mr. Gottlieb said. Mr. McCready says he did nothing wrong.

A year later, Mr. McCready was charged with felony assault after a brutal fight outside a bar on St. Patrick's Day. "I was defending myself," he told Newsday. "I'm not the bad guy. I wore the white hat all my life." He accused investigators of lying and framing him - the same things Mr. Tankleff accused him of doing.

A judge acquitted Mr. McCready.

'Marty Is Innocent'

Mr. Tankleff's supporters say the facts show innocence.

If he had wanted to kill his parents, for example, why did he cradle his wounded father, call 911 and apply first aid to keep him alive?

And why would he kill his mother and father? Mr. McCready claims the motive was anger at his parents for limiting his driving to a "crummy old Lincoln," restricting use of a boat, having a chaperon when they were away and scolding him for not setting up the poker table.

Relatives scoff at that theory. Seymour Tankleff's brother, Norman, and Arlene's sisters, Marcella and Marianne, describe the family as loving. Adopted at birth, Martin was being groomed to go into his father's business. "There was no way Marty could have hurt them," they wrote to prosecutors. "Marty is innocent and will forever be innocent."

The family denounced Mr. McCready as "unscrupulous, unprofessional, unethical."

Now 32, Mr. Tankleff faces 36 more years behind bars before he is eligible for parole. "From Day 1 I have maintained my innocence," he said, "because I had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on my parents. I loved my parents and would never have harmed them."

When Bureaucrats Speak...

This essay by former Republican Congressman McCloskey brings out some of the common features in government cover-ups and the former officials who expose them. It shows that American history is in fact made by those who are willing to step outside of the Iron Cage known as the US government. The way American history has gone thus far, being character-assassinated by the US government should be seen as a badge of honor. It is the Clarkes, the Ellsbergs and the O'Neills that we owe thanks to, not the Bushes or the Nixons.

The Medium, the Message, and 9/11 Ownership

A Star is Born: Richard Clarke on CNN

Frank Rich pulls no punches in his column in today's Arts & Leisure section of the Times. According to Rich, the issue all along has not been whether or not the facts of the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 failure have been out, but whether or not these facts have found their way to television as in the past several extraordinary days they finally have.

Though it’s hard not to come to the same conclusions as Rich concerning the administration’s motives, it’s harder still to deny his assertion that television is driving this story at least as much as this story is driving television.

Click below for the full article.

FRANK RICH
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the Situation Room?

Published: April 4, 2004

In comedy, as in politics, timing is everything. You have to wonder just what George W. Bush was thinking on the night of Wednesday, March 24, when he decided to do stand-up at the end of the most gripping day of 9/11 television since 9/11 itself.

That afternoon had brought Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission, a classic piece of Washington committee-room theater. Mr. Clarke's mea culpa — "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you" — is likely to join our history's greatest-hits video reel, alongside Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency, sir?," Howard Baker's "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" and Clarence Thomas's "high-tech lynching." That evening, Tom Brokaw, generally the least contentious (and most watched) of the three network anchors, took the startling step of giving Condoleezza Rice the first hard slap of her heretofore charmed life in the public eye: "Dr. Rice, with all due respect, I think a lot of people are watching this tonight, saying: `Well, she can appear on television, write commentary, but she won't appear before the commission under oath. It just doesn't seem to make sense.' " As indeed it did not, to anyone.

Was this the best night for the president to do a comedy routine touching on his administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Maybe you had to be in the hall — an annual black-tie dinner for broadcast journalists in Washington — as I was not. But as Howard Dean learned in Iowa, it's only how you come across on TV that matters in America, not what it feels like in the moment. On TV, Mr. Bush's jocular slide show, in which he is seen searching for Saddam's arsenal in the Oval Office, proved an unwanted bookend to Mr. Clarke's opening act. A nation of viewers that had watched a public servant mourn the unnecessary loss of American life on 9/11 now saw the president make light of the rationale that necessitated the sacrifice of an additional 500-plus Americans (so far) in the war fought in 9/11's name.

There will be many more such whipsaw days of television to come. This drama has legs. It is hurtling toward September 2004, when Mr. Bush appears at the Republican convention in New York against an implicit, and possibly literal, ground zero backdrop. For reasons that are rarely unselfish, everyone wants to own a piece of 9/11. Whether it's TV ads that invoke the ruins and corpses of the World Trade Center to sell the Bush-Cheney campaign or a short-lived effort by MBNA (coincidentally or not, the biggest Bush contributor in 2000) to market a "Spirit of America" MasterCard picturing the ground zero firemen hoisting the flag, power and money are at stake, not just our security.

The role of television in the fight for ownership of 9/11 is paramount. The medium and its latest star performers — Mr. Clarke, Ms. Rice, the 9/11 commissioners — are driving the show now, often independently of any actual news. If anything, the dirty little secret about the uproar over Mr. Clarke is that his "shocking" revelations had been previously revealed, long before he went on "60 Minutes" or published his book.

It was 27 months ago that Bob Woodward, writing in The Washington Post, first quoted the president as saying that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush administration's downsizing, stalling and fumbling of the fight against terrorism in the seven-plus months between Inauguration Day and 9/11 was reported by Time in August 2002. The failure of Ms. Rice to advance Mr. Clarke's Jan. 25, 2001, memo on al Qaeda's urgent threat has been recounted (and sourced) in detail in such best sellers as Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" and Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud," both of which beat Mr. Clarke's own account to the stores. (Still to come is a new Woodward best seller about the ramp-up to Iraq, "Plan of Attack," which "60 Minutes" will herald two weeks from tonight and which Rush Limbaugh is already pre-emptively trashing as being from "the same publisher" as the Clarke book.)

But print, even best-selling print, doesn't matter much in the 21st-century American arena. The Bush administration's game was to keep these revelations away from the center stage of wall-to-wall TV coverage. To this end, it succeeded in blocking the formation of the 9/11 commission for a year. Then it threw every conceivable roadblock in its path, from Henry Kissinger (the original appointee as chairman) to delays in providing documents and testimony. That the investigation got going anyway is a tribute not to Mr. Clarke, the Democrats or any journalist but to the telegenic clout of the 9/11 families. Like all victims of horrific crimes, they are sought after as television "gets" in a culture that likes up-close-and-personal TV replays of tragedies. The 9/11 families used their many on-air minutes to keep pushing for a commission until the White House had to cry uncle.

The families remain crucial TV players in the story. Their applause when a sharp Clarke riposte one-upped a Republican interrogator, the supercilious former Illinois governor James Thompson, played mightily on screen, as did their tearful embraces of Mr. Clarke after his testimony. Mr. Clarke, who has spent his entire career in the shadowy bowels of the Washington bureaucracy, has also proved to be a natural before the camera. With his sonorous voice, secret-agent aura and vaguely intimidating body language, he's as commanding in his weird way as Orson Welles in full noir. His menacing stare in response to another antagonistic interrogator on the 9/11 commission, John Lehman, seemed to brush back Mr. Lehman much as Mr. Clarke's verbal darts drove Mr. Thompson from the hearing room altogether. Four days later came the pièce de résistance on "Meet the Press," where Mr. Clarke pulled a rabbit out of a hat in the form of an adulatory handwritten note from President Bush. This move not only checkmated the administration's efforts to belittle Mr. Clarke's government service but did so with a subliminal visual echo of Tim Russert's most iconic TV image, his brandishing of his handwritten slate of electoral vote calculations on election night, 2000.

The White House, so often masterly in its TV management, particularly where 9/11 is concerned, has been wildly off its game. First, the White House press secretary said that Mr. Bush was too busy to watch the hearings — always a bad idea in a country of TV addicts. Soon administration emissaries went on full-court press to chastise Mr. Clarke for promoting a self-serving book at the height of election season. The only problem with that strategy is that one of its creators, Mr. Bush's once and future communications czar, Karen Hughes, was just days from starting her current nonstop TV tour to hype her own self-serving book about her White House tenure (9/11 included). Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, went even further, attacking Mr. Clarke's book as an attempt to profiteer on his inside access and "highly classified information." Apparently Mr. Frist did not know that the White House itself had vetted Mr. Clarke's book for possible security transgressions and approved it. Nor did the senator seem to remember that he had written his own, far cheesier post-9/11 cash-in book, "When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor." (I know it sounds like a parody, but that's the real title.)

Someone should get poor Ms. Rice a book contract just to keep her off the air. She's been the wackiest serial TV guest since Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, turning up everywhere except "Hollywood Squares" to insist that she would really, truly love to testify before the 9/11 commission but wouldn't — except in private. It was easy to see why she held to this doomed strategy for so long. From day to day, her changing recollection of what Mr. Bush did or didn't say about Iraq to Mr. Clarke in the Situation Room on 9/12 had been harder to track than Colonel Mustard's perambulations in the billiard room in a protracted game of Clue. Now that she has bowed to the inevitable and will testify in public under oath after all, she had better resolve all her contradictory statements pronto, lest Senator Frist unleash the same reckless insinuations of perjury that he had leveled at Mr. Clarke.

Democrats who are enjoying this all a bit too much should remember that their own favorite, John Kerry, is a terrible TV actor in his own right. Just as the Clarke juggernaut was about to mercifully wipe him off the screen, the Massachusetts senator was skiing in the ostentatiously tony precincts of Ketchum, Idaho, and making on-camera pronouncements about Iraq like "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." For the moment, he has escaped with minor damage, if only because 9/11 trumps all other discourse. Mr. Kerry's best hope is that Mr. Bush, in his zeal to protect his ownership of that day, the most saleable commodity of his presidency, will keep the Clarke story alive indefinitely on television, as, so far, he seems determined to do.

But neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry is in command. As the families will continue to fight for their ownership of 9/11, so will forces beyond anyone's control. Like all gripping dramas, this one has a subtext, and the subtext in this case is fear. Last Sunday on "60 Minutes" Ed Bradley dipped a toe into it by noting that there were fewer attacks in the 30-month period leading up to 9/11 than there have been in "the 30 months afterward when you had this war against it." Ms. Rice was dismissive of his logic. "Ed, I think that's the wrong way to look at it," she said. But that's the way many, if not most, in America do look at it. For all the sturm and drang we've watched in Washington since Richard Clarke went on "60 Minutes" two weeks ago, nothing has happened yet to dispel our underlying terror that the real owner of 9/11 is still al Qaeda.