Tortured Justice - Further Tales of Crimes of the Bush Adminstration

[CIA Director Gen. Michael] Hayden told agency employees Thursday that the recordings were destroyed out of fear the tapes would leak and reveal the identities of interrogators. He said the sessions were videotaped to provide an added layer of legal protection for interrogators using new, harsh methods. President Bush had just authorized those methods as a way to break down the defenses of recalcitrant prisoners.

Clearly, the destruction of the tapes was meant to offer a layer of legal protection, but not for the people who conducted the interrogations, but rather for the person who authorized them.

It is worth remembering that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 already provides legal protection for any "officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States Government who is a United States person, arising out of the officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent's engaging in specific operational practices, that involve detention and interrogation of aliens who the President or his designees have determined are believed to be engaged in or associated with international terrorist activity that poses a serious, continuing threat to the United States, its interests, or its allies, and that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time that they were conducted." While the Military Commissions Act of 2006 extended that to include the period from 9/11 to the enactment of Detainee Treatment Act.

Republicans were mostly mum about the CIA disclosure. McCain, a presidential candidate, said while campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday that he would not side with Democrats' calls for an investigation because he believed the CIA's actions were legal.

"That doesn't mean I like it," McCain added.

"Of course I object to it," he said of the tapes being destroyed. "Right now, our intelligence agencies need credibility and this is not helpful to that."

Reserving judgment on the question of whether the destruction of the tapes itself was legal, McCain is correct in that this surely further erodes the credibility of the CIA and US. But McCain surely misses the point of the investigation called for by Senate Democrats. Dick Durbin "called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to find out 'whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.'" Lying to Congress, specifically to the 9/11 Commission, about the existence of the tapes and then their destruction, it turns out, is clearly illegal. As is lying to a federal judge who, in the 2005 Zacarias Moussaoui case, "ordered the government to disclose whether it had video or audio tapes of specific interrogations."

It's hard not to contrast the breathtaking silence on the Right, and even the relatively low key response of the MSM, to revelation after revelation of law breaking in the current administration to the apoplexy of these same people nine years ago over Clinton's "perjury". Not 20 minutes ago, on CSPAN-2, Newt Gingrich had the cajones to defend, with a straight face, the impeachment of Bill Clinton on the grounds that perjury is a felony and the rule of law must be upheld.

The Bush Administration ordered torture - in violation of US law - lied to Congress about it - in violation of US law - ordered the destruction of the evidence - in violation of US law - and the most outrage any of the Republican presidential hopefuls can come up with is that he "doesn't ... I like it." Pathetic.

And if I may be permitted one last shot:

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Friday that President Bush did not recall being told about the tapes or their destruction. But she could not rule out White House involvement in the decision to destroy the tapes, saying she had only asked the president about it, not others.

These interrogations are supposedly at the epicenter of the so-called "War On Terror"(TM) and Bush claims to not be able to recall whether any record of the interrogations was made. Isn't it amazing how rudderless and independent the US national security apparatus becomes when they do wrong. This on the tail of claims by Bush that he was similarly out of loop on intelligence that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program - until it became public knowledge. And this version of Bush - out of touch and unaware - is the defense that the White House is offering.

Update: Destruction of C.I.A. Tapes Could Alter Prosecutions

The destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes showing interrogations of top operatives of Al Qaeda, including Abu Zubaydah, could complicate the prosecution of Mr. Zubaydah and others, and it underscores the deep uncertainties that have plagued government officials about the interrogation program.

Officials acknowledged on Friday that the destruction of evidence like videotaped interrogations could raise questions about whether the Central Intelligence Agency was seeking to hide evidence of coercion. A review of records in military tribunals indicates that five lower-level detainees at Guantánamo were initially charged with offenses based on information that was provided by or related to Mr. Zubaydah. Lawyers for these detainees could argue that they needed the tapes to determine what, if anything, Mr. Zubaydah had said about them.

While I've no doubt that the RW Noise-o-Sphere will read this as another reason why quaint legal protections such as the right to an attorney are a dangerous luxury "post 9-11", is there any clearer evidence of the corruption of the current administration? Given a choice between prosecuting alleged terrorists and covering their asses, they chose the later.

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Bush: I'm Not Corrupt, Just Dangerously Incompetent

Democrats incredulous over Bush's account of Iran report

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden on Tuesday said he can't believe President Bush hasn't known for months about a recent intelligence estimate that downplays the nuclear threat from Iran.

Joe Biden says "he refuses to believe" that Bush didn't know about a new assessment of Iran's nuclear program.

Other Democratic candidates also slammed Bush for continuing to ratchet up the rhetoric against Tehran.

On Tuesday the president acknowledged he had given a speech warning that Iran's nuclear development risked "World War III" about two months after his intelligence chief told him a reassessment of Tehran's nuclear ambitions was under way.

Bush told reporters during a White House news conference that he was not told the details of the new assessment until last week and he said the new report, which found that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons work in 2003, will not change U.S. policy toward Iran.

"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said, pointing out that Tehran continues to try to enrich uranium for civilian purposes and therefore develop technology that could be used for a weapon.

"They had the program. They halted the program. It's a warning signal because they could restart it," he said. Video Watch President Bush call Iran 'dangerous' »

Bush told reporters that he was told of "new information" about Iran in August during a briefing by Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

"He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze," the president said. He said he wasn't briefed about the new information until the new intelligence report was prepared last week.

The Democratic presidential candidates were incredulous that Bush did not know about the assessment's new finding.

Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called that explanation "unbelievable."

"Are you telling me a president that's briefed every single morning, who's fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in '03?" Biden asked in a conference call with reporters.

"I refuse to believe that," he added. "If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history."

Bingo.

Time and time again the defense that the Bush administration offers against charges of corruption are no better than the charges that they're defending themselves against. We are to either believe that the Bush administration knew that Iran did not have an active nuclear weapons program but continued to promote war is the only available option for the US to this nonexistent threat.

Or that the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, the Decider, wasn't in the loop on the most up-to-date intelligence in a matter of vital national security that directly related to the possibility of going to war with another nation that would endanger the lives of Americans, Iranians and many thousands of others throughout the Middle East. And that, while he was enthusiastically speaking of the Iranian nuclear weapons program threat nobody in his administration who knew better came forward to counsel him otherwise. And that he didn't already have in place systems for gathering, assimilating them being briefed on the most critical, up-to-date and relevant intelligence pertaining to one the largest decisions than any president can ever undertake - the decision to go to war. And that he didn't accept personal responsibility for asking for - no, demanding - the best available information.

He either knew and lied. Or he didn't care to know. I'm honestly not sure which is worse.

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Pottery Barn Rule: Iraq's isn't the only government the war has broken.

For their current cover story Mother Jones Magazine has invited 50 experts from generals to antiwar activists to comment on questions of when and how to exit Iraq. The results are interesting largely because there is no clear consensus. The people asked had opinions ranging from 'get out now' to 'we can never leave'. Predictions about what would happen when we exited ranged from 'they'll work it out somehow' to 'apocalypse now'. What is clear, however, is that there are no clear answers. Anyone looking for an easy out or an easy solution is looking for something that just doesn't exist. For anyone paying attention the reason should be self-evident. It may be the case that if we 'broke it' we 'bought it', but is also the case that we broke it. That is, actions have consequences. The fact that the Bush administration launched this ill-advised and illegal war and the fact that they handled it sold poorly over the past five years simply can't be undone by a few thousand extra troops or any period of time or any amount of money.

But it's just as wrong to imagine that withdrawing all the troops immediately will have the salutary effects that staying the course hasn't. It simply isn't true that merely doing the opposite of what's failing will succeed. Yes, of course, it is the case with the continued American occupation is in itself fueling the insurgency. But to go from that to saying that withdrawing all troops immediately will remove the only impetus for the conflicts within Iraq relies on new less simple a model of Iraq and then the 'they hate us for our freedoms' analysis or the idea that the Iraqis will naturally strive towards something like American-style democracy if only we given the breathing space to do so. However damaging the hopes for the future of the Iraqi people that the sense of being occupied by a foreign occupier may be having, other dynamics have been released by the fall of Saddam Hussein that have nothing whatsoever to do with America or the occupation. Simply put, there is no way to simply put the dynamics at play in Iraq today or to easily say what the best way to withdraw is or what will likely happen in any of those scenarios.

This hasn't stopped any of our politicians on either side of the aisle from falling into the same familiar traps and lazy intellectual shorthand that has characterized what passes for debate over our Iraq policy from its misbegotten inception. Witness this morning the performance of John McCain on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I counted about three times, but there may have been more, than McCain repeated what is sure to be the new Republican talking point. "Six months ago the Democrats were saying the surge could not work militarily." McCain didn't name the these miscreant Democrats. And I'm not sure exactly who was saying that it wasn't possible for the military to establish some greater amount of security in Iraq. To my knowledge, most of the critics of The Surge™ acknowledged that, with enough people, enough time, enough violence, enough force and enough money, some measure of greater security could be achieved in Iraq. But then what? The argument for the beginning has been not that the military couldn't succeed in military objectives, but rather that there isn't a military solution to the complex set of problems facing the Iraqi people today. Even the President acknowledged when he introduced The Surge™ that increased security was merely the precondition for the real work that needed to be done in Iraq. That work is political and social and economic in nature. And it's exactly that work that has never been attempted by the current administration.

This is not, however, stop John McCain from using 'progress' on the military front to launch a new round of right-wing triumphalism and launch a new round of partisan attacks against the Democrats. For their own part, the Democrats demonstrated their continued tone deafness to the launching of right-wing talking points in the form of a lackluster performance by New Mexico Governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson. Richardson demonstrated once again why it is, despite being one of the most antiwar of the presidential candidates, that his campaign just can't seem to catch fire. Rather than picking up on and directly challenging McCain's assertion that the Democrats predicted that the surge could not possibly succeed militarily and turning the table on McCain by pointing out how wrong he was in supporting the war in the first place, Richardson played into McCain's framing. This allowed the talking heads in the following segment to repeat the charge that the Democrats just don't seem to be able to welcome good news in Iraq.

To be fair, the box of the Democrats find themselves in is not entirely of their own creation. The American people are of two minds when it comes to getting out of Iraq. They want out. But at the same time they also don't want to lose. In fact, they want out because of their sense that we are currently losing. This opens the door for someone to come along to promise a plausible path to victory. Not that the America people aren't skeptical at this moment about such promises, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that they aren't persuadable. When it comes to withdrawing, they do want to start bringing our troops home sooner rather than later. But they want to do so in an orderly fashion. In 2006 they elected a Congress with a mandate to do the one thing that Congress can't do, and that is the planned, phased withdrawal coupled with an internationalizing of the peacekeeping operations in Iraq. Congress is the left with very few bows in their quiver. This is not the least the case because of the power grab of the Bush administration over the past six years. It turns out that those Checks and Balances that those whiny liberals have been bellyaching about actually matter. And now that they've eroded Congress has considerably less power to do the things that the American people now find they want them to. It also turns out that ending a war is a lot more difficult than starting one. Which is another point that those whiny liberals tried to make before we started it.

So it seems likely that we will continue our occupation of Iraq more or less at its present level, minus the drawdown that was part of the plan for The Surge™ from the very start. The Bush administration simply is not equipped to do anything differently. If by some miracle the common sense faerie sprinkled wisdom and insight over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the Bush administration also doesn't possess the political capital to pull off the thing the American people would like them to. In Iraq and internationally the Bushies are spent. And the one thing that Congress can do to start to bring the troops home, which is to cut off funding, is the one thing the American people don't want them to do. Just like in Iraq, actions have consequences and dynamics have been unleashed that can't be easily and done. Just like in Iraq, our current political situation does not allow for the easy answers that partisans on both sides seem to think are available to them.

Yes, Iraq is broken. But so too is the American political system. And sadly, nothing short of regime change will be able to fix that.

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McClellan and the Government-Media Echo Chamber

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

And so reads, in it's entirety, a brief excerpt from Scott McClellan's upcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush Whitehouse and What's Wrong With Washington, due out in April from PublicAffairs Books.

The MSM covered but largely buried the admission from Bush's former press secretary that Bush was "involved" in passing along "false information" regarding who was involved in the outing of Valarie Plame as a covert CIA agent.

The progressive media, however, was all over it. Demanding impeachment. Demanding to know why the MSM wasn't covering the story more prominently. This was the smoking gun that came in the form of a confession from a former high level Whitehouse official.

The Whitehouse itself in response demurred, "The president has not and would not ask his spokespeople to pass on false information." And an editor for the publisher downplayed the meaning of the excerpt.

Peter Osnos, editor at large of Public Affairs Books, said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening that McClellan doesn't believe Bush deliberately lied to him about Libby's and Rove's involvement.

"He told him something that wasn't true, but the president didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said.

So is it much ado about nothing?

As usual the Whitehouse denial isn't much better than the thing they're denying. The President was out of touch and out of control, unaware of what his top aide, his Vice President and the VP's top aide were doing when it came to committing treason - and unwilling to accept responsibility for what comes out of his administration unless you can prove incontrovertibly that The Decider was directly involved.

Whether Bush knew or didn't that Rove, Libby and Cheney had committed a crime, Bush is still responsible for the actions of his administration. Even if it were true that Bush didn't know then, he knows now. To date, no one involved has been held to account. Libby came close, but Bush's one decisive action in the whole affair was to quickly ensure that this one brush with accountability was averted. And whether Bush was actively involved in the cover up or passively avoiding uncovering the truth, the Decider in Chief failed at an essential test of leadership. He vowed that "if there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of." There was a leak. It did break the law. Take care of it already.

I will, however, admit that McClellan's teaser in itself is not enough to warrant the apoplexy it received from some quarters on the Left. The normally sensible Thom Hartmann devoted much of his Thanksgiving show to importance of McClellan's revelation and demands that the "corporate media" cover the story with more prominence.

By way of comparison, I still have vivid memories of press coverage of the first minor leaks from the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky case. With far less to go on than is available in the present instance, all of the networks and the 24/7 cable news outlets declared that the Presidency was In Crisis - complete with splashy graphics and round the clock speculation.

Perhaps more than shedding light on corruption and deceit in the Bush Whitehouse, the reactions to McClellan's statement sheds light on the differing attitudes the Left and the Right have toward and expectations they have for the press. I have zero doubt that had the entire matter played out exactly the same excepting the parties of those involved were reversed, the MSM would have all over the story. More splashy graphics. More unwarranted speculation.

But that isn't based on a belief that the MSM is somehow inherently biased toward Republicans. Rather it's based on the belief that Republicans are just better at playing the MSM game. The MSM has a problem with news or information that seems to clearly favor one political party over the other. Covering the news straight might make them seem biased, un-"balanced". The Right knows this. They know that if the GOP leadership and the RW Noise Machine, in concert, raise a fuss over any event, no matter how unfounded, the MSM will feel obliged to cover it. The Right has figured out that the work-around for this problem that the MSM has adopted is that so as they are merely repeating someone else's partisan attacks that they, the MSM, cannot be accused of bias.

In contrast, as evidenced by the expectations expressed by Thom Hartmann that the MSM cover the McClellan story simply because of it's significance, the Left still seems to think that the MSM ought to practice journalism. How very quaint.

The MSM didn't run with this story simply because Pelosi, Reid, Clinton, et al failed to irresponsibly seize on McClellan's tidbit and loudly and indignantly renew demands for impeachment.

Headlines such as Former Press Secretary Points Finger at Bush, Cheney for Deceit in CIA Leak Scandal are about as far as they can go. Heck, they're just saying what the guy said. The MSM relies entirely on someone else to do the heavy lifting of making a case for the significance of the story.

Not unlike Bush, the MSM has responded to the illegal outing of an undercover CIA agent with complete passivity. Both the government and press have their own ethical obligations to actively seek truth and justice. And neither are willing to accept the responsibility.

For that matter, McClellan's statement too reads less like an accusation and more like a denial of responsibility in itself.

Heck, they all say, I just repeated what I was told. So if everyone is just repeating the claims of others, and no one will accept responsibility for uncovering the truth...

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Fundamentals of Micro-Management - Or, How to Lose the War by Not Really Trying

Next week, the House will begin debate on an emergency war spending bill. Some in the Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micro-manage our military commanders, or to force a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq, or threaten vital funding for Iraqi security forces, and fund projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror. I believe the members of Congress are sincere when they support our troops. And now is the time for them to show that support. Our men and women in uniform are risking their lives and they need the firm support of the United States Congress.
George W Bush

Where to begin? Perhaps that the Iraq War is a project that has nothing to do with the war on terror? Too easy.

I think instead we should start with the new talking point about "micro-managing" the war and what it says about the Bush administration. It says that the Bush administration thinks of the troops like they do tanks or bombs, as tools in a global game of Risk.

Let's take time to review. After a disastrous execution of a poorly conceived war, President Bush was finally forced to admit that "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable". A new plan is needed. So he proposed last January a "surge" of approximately 20,000 more troops in a plan nearly identical to the one that just failed the previous summer. And the fall of the year before that. And really a bunch more times. Faced with the fact that Bush has correctly noted that "the consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable", yet he preparing to follow a plan almost certain to deepen that failure, Congress decided to rediscover their Constitutional authority "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces".

But the efforts were rather disingenuous. While Senate Democrats criticized their Republican counterparts for filibustering the debate on the debate on a non-binding resolution, Bush went ahead with the surge as planned.

Surprisingly, no one has really called Bush on this immoral game of Chicken. Knowing, of course, that the Democrats would never deny funding for troops already there, Bush decided to send them anyway - or at least start to - without first securing the equipment or funds they need.

Few people noted that the troops wouldn't be adequately equipped.

The thousands of troops that President Bush is expected to order to Iraq will join the fight largely without the protection of the latest armored vehicles that withstand bomb blasts far better than the Humvees in wide use, military officers said.

Vehicles such as the Cougar and the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle have proven ability to save lives, but production started late and relatively small numbers are in use in Iraq, mostly because of money shortages, industry officials said.
...
Under a $125 million contract, the Marines are buying 100 Cougar and 44 Buffalo armored trucks, known collectively as MRAP, for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, made by Force Protection Inc., a small company in Ladson, S.C. The firm is producing 40 vehicles a month, said its vice president, Mike Aldrich, a retired Army officer educated at West Point.
...
The military services said last month that they need 4,060 of the MRAP vehicles, with 2,500 for the Army, 538 for the Navy and 1,022 for the Marines. The delivery schedule is uncertain. Meanwhile, a permanent replacement for the Humvee, incorporating the latest design and armor improvements, is years away, Pentagon officials said, and mired in technical and cost disputes.

This is hardly surprising though considering that more than two years after Rumsfeld was called on the carpet by a soldier for lack of adequate armor, it's still the case that the troops already in Iraq face persistant equipment shortages.

Excepting that belatedly, thanks to Jack Murtha, the Democrats finally decided to stand up well enough for the troops to insist that they be rested, trained and equipped before we send them over to risk their lives.

The President is not pleased. And he has threatened to, for the second time, veto an emergency spending bill with money for the war (and the troops) if it had any "strings". This is essentially saying that Bush himself would rather cut off funds for the troops rather than accept any check on his authority.

Considering that the 109th Congress held exactly five hearings in the House and the Senate held three, and considering the results, I will go out on a limb and say that a 'hands off' approach by Congress has not been a great success. The Republican controlled Congress gave Bush all the rope he needed - and he hung himself with it. Whether he knows it or not, the Democrats are doing Bush a solid.

Nonetheless, the Republicans and their anointed noise makers are making plenty of noise about the dangers of "micro-managing" the war. "How would you like it if Congress made a decision that you really only needed one destroyer in your task force, or you get along without the submarine or maybe you only needed half the supplies on your supply ship?" - Steve King (R-IA)

King's remarks are typical of the strawman arguments being used by the Republicans. No Democratic proposal gets into the fine granularity of the determining the specific number of destroyers or submarines. (Although I'm not sure how many subs are being used in the Iraq war.) But these strawman arguments aren't meant to be persuasive - or even heard. The idea is to label any sort of management by Congress of the war as "micromanagement" and to leave a rhetorical trail of plausible deniability if anyone ever called upon them to say why demanding adequate equipment is Congressional overreach.

Not that they need to worry about that much. There seems to be no signs at the moment that anyone in the press will be pressing them on that question any time soon.

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Children of the Corn Subsidies: Maybe Bush Has a Good Solution

The New York Times has editorialized that Bush's proposal for reforming our farm policies is A Bill Democrats Should Like. On the surface, it seems like they are correct that this is "one of the more sensible pieces of legislation to emerge from this administration in quite a while."

It proposes a strict cap on payments to individual farmers as part of a larger effort to hold down traditional subsidies. It seeks to help smaller and younger farmers and poor rural communities.

And it includes the most generous conservation program ever offered by this administration: increasing spending by $7.8 billion over 10 years on land conservation and investing an additional $1 billion a year in a bold new program to develop renewable fuels other than corn ethanol from farm crops.

Oxfam, long a critic of US farming subsidies, calls the proposal "encouraging." Oxfam nearly correctly notes that, "subsidies encourage overproduction, with the surplus dumped on the international market, in turn lowering prices and undercutting the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers around the world."

It's also worth noting in our current political debate that those "farmers around the world" include Mexican farmers. With cheap subsidized corn, now no longer tariffed thanks to NAFTA, flooding the Mexican economy, Mexican agriculture workers flooded our borders looking for work.

I say "nearly" above because Oxfam misunderstood the nature of the subsidy program and the problem it was meant to address. Tom Phillpot at Grist, an enviro web site, gets to the core of the issue.

For about a century, the main problem facing U.S. agriculture has been abundance. Powered by the great 20th-century agricultural innovations -- hybridized and later genetically modified seed varieties, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and petroleum-powered machines -- farmers consistently churned out much more food than people could eat, causing prices to drop.

According to classical economics, farmers should respond to the "signal" of lower prices by cutting production, which would cause prices to stabilize. Instead, they've tended to respond by scaling up -- investing in land and technology to boost production. They hoped to make up in volume what they were losing in price -- creating a vicious circle of rising productivity, lower prices, and recurring farm crises.

If this seems counterintuitive, it's important to consider that farming is has a long production cycle - a year from beginning to end. Unlike, say VCR manufacturers, they cannot react rapidly to market forces. They have one shot every year to plan that year's production. If they cut production in an effort to raise prices, but no one else does, then they won't accomplish the goal of raising prices and will have to suffer through a year with lower prices and lower yield. It's a version of the classic problem in economics, The Prisoner's Dilemma.

Subsidies started as a means to correct this problem not by lowering the cost of production to the farmer, but rather by lowering the output of the farmer. And then in the 70s they morphed. The new idea was to sell as much of our agriculture product overseas as possible, even if (as in the case of the USSR) we had to subsidize that. And subsidies became a way to support farmers with direct payments when prices dipped below the cost of production.

So reducing the subsidies (which nearly everyone agrees is correct at least for big agri-business which receives the lion's share of the subsidies) limits an ineffective solution to the problem. And that's good. But it still leaves the base problem. Everyone will still overproduce and prices won't rise. Oxfam won't get it's desired outcome.

One obvious portion of the solution would be to feed our own people. The federal government has paid farmers $164.7 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2005. Even Bush's new scaled back bill will cost $87.8 billion over the next five years. At the same time, eleven percent of American families are "food insecure", in the new Bush adminstration euphamistic way of saying "hungry". All of those billions could feed a lot of people and still help farmers by creating legitimate demand.

The Farm and Food Policy Project has proposed a somewhat vague but still innovative and reasonably comprehensive set of proposals. (PDF link) The proposals are largely market based and so should get support from the Right. These include revenue based risk management schemes and savings programs for farmers to give them a greater sense of stability.

It includes programs to encourage farmers to switch away from the heavily subsidized corn to alternate crops with emerging domestic markets, like organic produce. They advise, instead of subsidies, targeted investments in farmers willing to make the adjustment so that they can afford to transition.

Diversifying production would also reduce competitive pressures. If a farmer isn't producing the same crop as everyone else, there's less of a need to overproduce to hedge against price drops. But farmers will need assistance in setting up distribution networks to transition away from corn and soybeans.

So credit where credit is due, Bush's proposal seems like a small step in the right direction and is probably the most our Congress will be able to produce. But it still falls far short of what is needed.

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