noteviljustwrong.com

On October 7, Phelim McAleer joined the Society of Environmental Journalists. Three days later, he took advantage of his new membership to attend former Vice President Al Gore’s speech to the group in Madison, Wis., and to rush up to the microphone afterward to ask a question. Reading from a small scrap of paper, an assistant filming the whole thing, McAleer asked Gore about a court case brought by British parents who challenged the veracity of nine facts in Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and argued that the film should be taken out of schools.

“Do you accept the findings,” asked McAleer, “and have you done anything to correct those errors?”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Gore had heard this before. McAleer, a journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, was promoting an upcoming documentary, “Not Evil Just Wrong,” which takes aim at environmentalists in general and Gore in particular. The film’s official premiere was only a week away. So Gore tried to move on. “Well, I’m not going to go through all of those,” he said. “The ruling was in favor of the movie, by the way. The ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools.”

But while dismissing the question, Gore joked that one of the controversies in his documentary was whether polar bears were endangered. “Word didn’t get to the polar bears,” he chuckled.

McAleer saw an opening and took it. “Well, the number of polar bears have increased, and are increasing.”

Gore raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think they’re in danger, do you?”

“The number of polar bears have increased.”

“Do you think they’re endangered?”

“The number of polar bears have increased.”

The event’s organizers mobilized, cutting the sound on McAleer’s microphone as he continued to pose questions. Moderator Tim Wheeler called it a “Warholian moment,” implying that McAleer had wrought 15 short minutes of fame out of the encounter. He had a point. Within 48 hours, McAleer had appeared on “Fox and Friends,” “Your World With Neil Cavuto,” and “Lou Dobbs,” and video of the encounter had appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Phelim McAleer on Fox News (YouTube)

This is shaping up to be a big week for McAleer and his co-director Ann McElhinney, and a celebratory moment for climate change skeptics everywhere. Two years ago the pair of Irish journalists broke the mold for conservative documentaries with “Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism,” a look at a Romanian town’s battle against foreign environmental activists who wanted to stop the building of a local gold mine. That portrait of poor, benighted Europeans flummoxed by jet-setting elitists set the stage for “Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria,” which was funded, according to McAleer, by less than $1 million from wealthy real estate investors. The slick documentary, by turns sardonic and grim, could do for opponents of the green movement what “No End In Sight” did for Iraq War opponents or — ideally — what Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did for McAleer’s foes.

“The strengths of the climate change skeptic movement, the ‘let science be science’ movement, have always been intellectual,” said Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that goes after greens. “The strength of the alarmist movement has always been emotive. This movie brings the human element in. It’s the first attempt, of a serious type, to put a human face on disastrous environmental policies.”

The film’s publicity campaign has targeted the conservative activists who should be most interested in watching Al Gore get ripped to shreds. Its promotional team includes movement new media pros like Danny Glover, formerly of National Journal, and Elizabeth Terrell, formerly of the David All Group. They’ve held pre-screenings for bloggers and brought the film to every major conservative conference of 2009, including the Values Voter Summit and Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, McAleer and McElhinney spoke right before Rush Limbaugh, whose presence helped them fill the Omni Shoreham’s ballroom in Washington.

“The left has figured out how this is done,” said Andrew Breitbart, the conservative new media mogul who anchored the CPAC panel. “This is primary tool they use to influence political debate: one-way communication using film and television. We need to get into this game. Here you have a movie that is fact-based, that tugs at the heartstrings.”

The 90-minute documentary alternates among interviews with climate change skeptics, embarrassing encounters with environmentalists, and emotional looks at people whom McAleer and McElhinney say are being victimized by well-meaning greens. Some of its content will be familiar to conservatives who’ve long considered Gore, Greenpeace, and other environmentalists nothing but hoaxters.

Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who has become a critic of the group, appears in several interviews to make the case that environmentalists are hyping a non-existent threat of man-made global warming. “I don’t think it would be a bad thing for this earth to warm up,” says Moore, arguing that man-made warming might be staving off the effects of an ice age. In a brutally sarcastic narration, McAleer says that “environmentalists claim, and children believe, that melting glaciers and colder ice will cause catastrophic sea level rise.” To bring that point home, he interviews schoolchildren in Northern Ireland who’ve been convinced by Gore-style propaganda that sea levels are rising and polar bears are dying.

McAleer and McElhinney quickly move on to more obscure topics. In interviews with conservative civil rights leader Roy Innis and Ugandan activists, they argue that Rachel Carson’s campaign to ban the pesticide DDT was a case of junk science winning out over facts, and one that has led to the death of millions of Africans from malaria. A white American scientist is made to look like a buffoon who is horrified by the prospect of a DDT-soaked Uganda with more people and fewer birds. “Imagine Elton John without a piano!” she says.

That isn’t the only trick the directors borrow from Michael Moore. The case against cap-and-trade legislation is made with visits to Vevay, Ind., a small midwestern town with a profitable coal plant that employs thousands of people. McAleer found the location, he told me, because the energy company went to Vevay instead of a town in Spain after that country passed stricter environmental regulations. Vevay residents like Tim and Tiffany McElhany are shown fretting about the jobs they’d lose if coal was banned. The film ends with Tiffany McElhany trekking to Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion to deliver a letter, begging him to look again at the science and reconsider his ways. It’s a perfect illustration of the film’s message: Not only are environmentalists misguided, they’re ruining the lives of ordinary people of whom they know nothing.

“I hear a lot about clean coal,” McAleer said at a Washington screening of the film. “I don’t know the science but I think clean coal is crap. That guy in the film, Tim McElhany, has a white car, and he lives beside a coal plant.”

Some conservative films like last years “An American Carol” have been given mass releases that backfired when audiences failed to show up. “Not Evil Just Wrong” is bypassing that route, being sold directly over the Internet for $20, with buyers encouraged to wait until October 18 at 8 p.m. ET and press “play” at the same time. The website tells prospective viewers that the diffuse release plan can be a way to “have your own cinematic tea party.” According to McAleer, around 4,500 copies of the film have been distributed for screenings that could include dozens of people. McAleer, who is based in Washington will join Breitbart, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, and several conservative scholars for a special screening at the Heritage Foundation; on Tuesday afternoon, the conservative American Family Association forged a deal to stream the film live for anyone else who wanted to see it.

“We may at last be getting our Michael Moore,” said Fred Smith. “A virtuous Michael Moore!”

Turns out, the average coal company spends very little.

Most major coal companies  — including American Electric Power, Arch Coal, CONSOL Energy, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company — are members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), the group that has come under fire in the past months for its role in sending forged letters to members of Congress criticizing the House climate bill. (Power giant Duke Energy announced after the scandal emerged earlier this month that they dropped out of the group). According to a report that the Center for American Progress put together in April, ACCCE members have committed to spending $3.6 billion on clean coal technology research from 2003 through 2017. Meanwhile, ACCCE members made a combined profit of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008. As CAP points out, that means they are spending less than two cents in research on “clean coal” for every $1 of profit.

The federal government is also putting $2.8 billion toward those CCS projects. But the House climate and energy bill would provide $60 billion for CCS research and development through 2025 if it becomes law. The bill includes $1 billion for CCS demonstration and deployment each year, funded by a fee on consumers of fossil fuel-based electricity. And the bill provides rewards for early movers on CCS — for every ton of CO2 it sequesters, an electric utility that gets at least half its power from coal would receive bonus emission permits for 10 years.

So, while ACCCE plans to spend more than $45 million extolling the virtues of “clean coal” this year, they’re not putting much money down on making it a reality, and they’re doing their best to thwart a bill that would spend billions more on it.

The Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capitol blog has the basics. As expected, the price of permits hit an record low last week, caused by both the over-abundant credits and the falling demand. Credits sold for $2.19 per ton, down 30 percent from the last sale in June, when they went for $3.23 per ton.

This is interesting because RGGI is essentially the Northeast’s pilot project for a larger federal program that Congress is considering enacting. There are also several lessons here. One is that the overabundance of credits on the market mirrors one of the early problems in the European Union’s Emission Trading System. The failure to properly determine the necessary number of credits is what prevented the program from being effective in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in its early years. If credits are cheap and plentiful, the market does not create the need for industries to lower emissions as quickly.

But it also speaks to two other issues more relevant to the current situation in the United States, as WSJ’s Keith Johnson points out. One is that the recession had decreased demand for electricity, which in turn has reduced emissions and thus, demand for emission permits. He also notes that new discoveries of natural gas reserves in the U.S. have lowered the cost of that fossil-fuel alternative, which burns cleaner than coal. More power companies are switching to natural gas to meet emissions-reduction requirements, which has also lowered the demand for credits.

Most important, though, is that the businesses covered under the cap are on a path to meet their emissions reduction goals at a much lower cost than anticipated. They’re also looking to come in well under the cap that the plan sets out, in fact. This should be a relief for businesses, but is not necessarily a good thing for the environmental goals, since a tight cap is what drives innovation and the development of new energy sources.

What are the lessons for a federal plan? Foremost is the need for an accurate inventory of greenhouse gas emissions before a cap is put in place, and for the number of credits put on the market to reflect that. The EPA already puts out an annual inventory, but they’re still in the process of developing a new rule that will require each major emissions source in the United States to report its output – which will provide a more accurate starting point for a federal cap-and-trade system.

It also demonstrates the need for a cap-and-trade program to include regular revisits to the policy to update it as needed. These are often called “look-back” provisions, and they allow the program to be tinkered as necessary to meet the stated goals. A RGGI review is not scheduled until 2012, which means it’s unlikely that administrators will be able to tighten the program before then.

“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,” PHR medical adviser and lead report author Scott Allen, M.D., said in a statement released with the report.

Physicians, for example, would monitor detainees’ reactions to having their breathing blocked by a cloth over their head and try to figure out at what point the person feels helpless and out of control. As I noted in my story today about sleep deprivation, “learned helplessness” was one of the major goals of the CIA’s interrogation program, which operated on the false belief that a detainee who believes he is helpless will provide whatever information the interrogator is asking for. (The flaw in the plan is that the information is often false.)

Dr. Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors, makes a similar observation about possible unethical human experimentation in an appendix to the second edition of his book.

He writes: “Circumstantial evidence is leading me to believe that abusive research may have been done at Guantanamo and that an investigation of this matter is needed.” That circumstantial evidence is based on the “interrogation log” of Mohammed al-Qahtani, which “meticulously record[s] the prisoner’s tears and bathroom privileges, digressions on dinosaurs and reactions to the interrogators playing checkers.”  Miles continues:

The peculiar content and structure of this document makes sense if it is the log of research on coercive interrogation. This would account for why it focuses on the emotions and interactions of the prisoner, rather than on the questions that were asked and the information that was obtained. From the nature of prior CIA interrogation research and the log, it is possible to infer a design of the research project. As a research log, this log appears to be a chronological recording of clusters of stimuli (a stressor and a Theme) and responses.

PHR’s Scott Allen adds: “It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program.”

The report supports a lot but not all of retired FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan’s account of the torture. Soufan testified in May that both the FBI and the CIA members of the team interrogating Abu Zubaydah came to oppose Mitchell’s abusive techniques. Warrick and Finn report that most of the team were appalled by what Mitchell proposed — inducing a state of “learned helplessness” through making Abu Zubaydah terrified of the team — but it took a long time for opposition to congeal; and even then, not many people aside from Soufan actively tried to stop the torture. But The Post’s account supports Soufan’s testimony that the harsher techniques produced less valuable information than Soufan’s attempts to build an emotional bond with Abu Zubaydah.

The Post’s report also introduces an often overlooked element to the torture: the degree to which CIA headquarters — and, it seems, the Bush White House — directed Abu Zubaydah’s torture from halfway around the world. Owing in large part to the heated post-9/11 climate, there were institutional pressures against stopping the torture. When Mitchell and Jessen were convinced that Abu Zubaydah had nothing to further to tell after four or five days’ worth of 83 waterboarding sessions, this was the reply:

“Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent,” the former official said. “Headquarters said it would be on the team’s back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, ‘You’ve lost your spine.’ “

This, of course, was the implicit message that Mitchell and Jessen gave to the FBI and CIA interrogators who didn’t endorse Mitchell’s fear-based interrogation approach. And this is something that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence appears to be exploring: how the widespread state of fear in the United States after 9/11 led the Bush administration to embrace an interrogations regimen that presumed its conclusions: al-Qaeda have bombs ready to go off at any minute; al-Qaeda members possess the information necessary to stop the attacks; al-Qaeda members will only respond to physical and psychological horror.

These premises turned out not to be true. But in the climate that existed after 9/11, when the intelligence community appeared to have missed warning signs for the attacks (never mind the August 2001 “bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” presidential briefing), knowledgeable interrogators like Ali Soufan who tried to introduce calm professionalism to the interrogations were marginalized.

Postscript: one thing the piece doesn’t answer is how Mitchell and Jessen came to the CIA’s attention in the first place. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find this out and was summarily rejected.

This excerpt below (I’ve omitted the citations) explains how the majority’s “conservatism” in this case became just a form of backwardness:

There is no denying that the Court is correct when it notes that a claim of right to DNA testing, post-trial at that, is a novel one, but that only reflects the relative novelty of testing DNA, and in any event is not a sufficient reason alone to reject the right asserted. Tradition is of course one serious consideration in judging whether a challenged rule or practice, or the failure to provide a new one, should be seen as violating the guarantee of substantive due process as being arbitrary, or as falling wholly outside the realm of reasonable governmental action. We recognize the value and lessons of continuity with the past, but as Justice Harlan pointed out, society finds reasons to modify some of its traditional practices, and the accumulation of new empirical knowledge can turn yesterday’s reasonable range of the government’s options into a due process anomaly over time.

It’s been said that Souter’s influence on the court has been limited because he doesn’t espouse grand theories or writing particularly memorable, quoteworthy passages. But that’s also been his strength, as it’s allowed him to convey clearly and simply what he believes the constitution requires, unclouded by the desire to impress or advance an ideological agenda.

Although these things are always hard to predict, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor would appear to be a similar sort of justice — not particularly ideological, not flashy, but careful and open to the notion that interpretations of the constitution must progress along with advances in science and ethical mores.

To be sure, she’s been criticized for having denied a prisoner, Mark Descovic, the right to test DNA evidence after he was wrongly convicted of rape and murder, simply because his lawyer’s request came four days late. Not the most “empathetic” ruling, but then, the jury already knew Descovic’s DNA didn’t match that of the semen found in the victim; he was convicted based on his apparently coerced confession. He was eventually freed in 2006.

That’s the sort of ruling that could disappoint liberals who might think that fairness ought to have taken precedence over finality. As I’ve noted, Sotomayor’s prosecutorial background sometimes makes her a stickler for following the letter of the law rather than its spirit.

Still, one would hope that she, or any new justice, would be prepared to balance the values of continuity with progress in much the same way that  Souter did — or tried to — last week. To tip the balance on the court, however, that new justice will also have to be extraordinarily persuasive.

Here’s how the pregnant reader learned that her fetus had a likely fatal brain deformity, just one day after the time limit beyond which most doctors will no longer perform an abortion:

Our appointment began jovially. The perinatologist and nurse joked about names, and at one point, the doctor called the baby a “little rascal.” As the ultrasound continued, the room grew quiet. The perinatologist scanned the baby’s head again and again. He finally announced, in a solemn voice, “I’m seeing some things in the baby’s brain that concern me.” Time stopped, and everything in the universe shifted. Holding my partner’s hand, I struggled to listen despite the thick blanket of grief that settled over the room.

The doctor continued, “The baby has holoprosencephaly. It’s a brain malformation in which the forebrain fails to divide. Most of these babies die before term. Those that are born have severe disabilities.” He finally took a deep sigh and started to deliver the especially delicate part: “I don’t know what your beliefs are but some people would terminate a pregnancy of this nature. Since you are 22 weeks along, you would have to go to Wichita for the procedure.” Everyone in the room knew this was shorthand for, “You would have to see George Tiller, the infamous late-term abortion doctor. No one else will help you at this point.” Numb, I asked to know the baby’s gender. He placed the ultrasound wand back on my stomach and read the grainy image: “It’s a girl.” We walked out of the clinic with blank stares and wept in the car.

Read the rest of the excerpt here.

Science Daily reports the findings of Dr. Metin Başoğlu, Head of Section of Trauma Studies at King’s College London and the Istanbul Centre for Behaviour Research and Therapy, published in the April issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. The research concludes that even the sort of acts the U.S. military engaged in that aren’t normally classified as “torture” — stress positions, exposure to extreme temperatures and the like — can be more damaging than methods traditionally considered to be torture.

Focusing on the risk factors associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in former detainees, the researchers report that “captivity experience in a war setting was associated with 2.8 times greater risk of PTSD in comparison to being detained by state authorities in someone’s own country, possibly due to the greater perceived threat to life in a war setting.” Moreover, “being held captive by an enemy was a stronger risk factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than the actual experience of torture itself.”

Dr. Başoğlu concludes:

“Such views reflect a rather stereotypical image of torture as involving only certain atrocious acts of physical violence. While such disturbing images might be useful in channelling public reactions against torture, they also foster a skewed image of torture, reinforcing the perception in some people that ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’ treatments do not amount to torture. Far from downplaying the problem of torture, our studies highlight the fact that the reality of torture is far more serious than people generally believe.”

That may help explain the tragic death of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, a 31-year-old Yemeni who the military reports committed suicide on Monday in his cell at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, where he’s been detained since 2002.

Hanashi is the fifth prisoner reported to have taken his own life while imprisoned at Guantanamo.

Defense Department officials said that Hanashi was found “unresponsive and not breathing” when guards checked his cell Monday night. British journalist Andy Worthington, author of “The Guantanamo Files” who’s been closely following and documenting the cases of Guantanamo detainees, reports that “Salih had been a long-term hunger striker, refusing food as the only method available to protest his long imprisonment without charge or trial. According to weight records issued by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 124 pounds on his arrival at Guantánamo, but at one point in December 2005, during the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history, his weight dropped to just 86 pounds.”

Before Hanashi’s death, three Guantanamo detainees hanged themselves with sheets in June 2006. Another prisoner similarly killed himself on a home-made noose in May 2007.

On Tuesday, lawyers for Hanashi at the Center for Constitutional Rights warned that there could be more such suicides to come.

The frustrations and disappointment at the base are running high because the hopes for change under the new administration were so great. Only two people have gone home in the last five months, and, by all counts, conditions at the prison have not improved. Every day that passes makes it more likely that more people will die in detention under President Obama’s watch.

Lawyer David Remes, who represents more than a dozen other Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including at least one who’s tried to commit suicide and is now in a psychiatric ward there, similarly noted that the suicide of prisoners during indefinite detention and deprivation is not surprising: “Suicide is a human response to intolerable conditions. Being held at Guantanamo is intolerable for the men there in so many ways,” he said. “President Obama has to stop dithering and close Guantanamo.”

The New York Times’ William Broad and The Washington Times’ Sara Carter and Eli Lake have much more. While the declaration doesn’t reveal any military secrets, it documents at great length and in great detail the United States’ civilian nuclear energy facilities. The top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, Kit Bond (R-Mo.), told Carter and Lake that the screw-up provided “a virtual treasure map for terrorists.” David Albright, one of the most respected nuclear-weapons experts in Washington, told both papers much the same thing. He explained to The Washington Times:

“The problem is there are a few places where it shows rooms inside of buildings where fissile material is located,” he said. Although terrorists still would have difficulty penetrating U.S. security to acquire the material, he said, the disclosure was potentially a violation of U.S. law.

It’s unclear how this all happened. The document lists the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on its cover sheet, but a committee spokeswoman told both papers that the committee had nothing to do with its publication. If I read this Bond quote from The Washington Times correctly — “Our best understanding is that this was sent to GPO by staffers of the House leader” — he’s blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and if so, it’s unclear what the basis for that is*. The foreign affairs committee spokeswoman, Lynne Weil, pledged an investigation; Bond’s staff is looking into the publication as well.

Aftergood told The New York Times that the disclosure is “a one-stop shop for information on U.S. nuclear programs.” Yet his organization, the Federation of American Scientists, still has the 267-page document on its Website.

Update: So as best I can understand, Bond is referring to the fact that the Speaker of the House appoints the House Parliamentarian (the link is a PDF), and it’s the Parliamentarian who delivered the declaration to the GPO.

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