In 2008, Yu Keping, the head of China's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau and a professor at Peking University, published an attention-grabbing collection of essays called Democracy is a Good Thing. Coming from a Chinese Communist Party official said to be close to President Hu Jintao, Yu's bold assertion that "democracy is the best political system for humankind" was striking. But so was the fine print: Yu argued in the book that while "it is the inevitable trend for all nations of the world to move towards democracy ... the timing and speed of the development of democracy and the choice of the form and system of democracy are conditional." Among other things, he has resisted the idea that a multi-party political system would be appropriate for China. All of which is to say that Yu is something of a sphinx: As a New York Times profile observed last year, "Even China experts have a hard time determining whether Mr. Yu is a brave voice for change or simply a well-placed shill."

Which makes Yu -- who is in Washington this week -- a particularly interesting person to ask about the current moment in Chinese politics, in which the Communist Party is managing the transition from Hu to his presumed presidential successor, Vice President Xi Jinping, while watching the sudden explosion of anti-government, pro-democratic sentiment in the Arab world with palpable unease. The Chinese government began cracking down on human rights activists, artists, and writers in March, and barred another prominent writer from leaving the country this week.

Read on

In addition to questioning Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's mental state, the health of Bolivia's firebrand President Evo Morales also comes up in the WikiLeaks document dump (The WikiLeaks website appears to be down at the moment but I'll add a link to the original cable once it become available):

The U.S. ambassador in Brazil said in a January 2009 dispatch that Brazil's defense minister had confirmed a rumor that the leftist leader was suffering from "a serious sinus tumor" that might explain "why Morales has seemed unfocussed and not his usual self" at recent meetings.

Ambassador Clifford Sobel quoted the Brazilian, Nelson Jobim, as saying that "surgery will be an effort to remove it" and that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva "had offered Morales an examination and treatment at a Sao Paulo hospital."

Morales underwent surgery in February 2009, but the official story was that he had a deviated septum as a result of a soccer injury. Morales' spokesman stuck by that line today, saying the cable "had a big dose of speculation."

Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Kuwait-born imam at the center of the Burlington Coat Factory Community Center controversy, landed in Bahrain Thursday to begin a short tour of Persian Gulf countries.

He's on a trip funded by the State Department,  whose ostensible purpose is to educate Muslims abroad about how great it is to be a Muslim in the United States of America. He's even written a book about the subject, titled What's Right With Islam, which the State Department has distributed in the past (one edition is called What's Right With Islam Is What's Right With America).

In other words ... the cleric's mission is to tell Middle Easterners how the United States is a bastion of tolerance, even as he's subject to an increasingly vicious campaign back home -- when he's not being compared to Nazis, he's being called a terrorist sympathizer, or worse. This is a guy who stood before a synagogue audience in 2003 and declared, "I am a Jew." Gotta love the irony.

UPDATE: I got a call earlier this afternoon from a representative of the Burlington Coat Factory, who politely asked me to change the title of this post and the reference to the company, since it no longer owned the site where the Cordoba Initiative is planning to build its community center. I declined, explaining that I was making a joke (one that has been widely shared on the Internets). She then told me that the Associated Press had issued guidelines to its reporters telling them to refer to it as an "NYC mosque." I told her I don't work for the AP.

Anyway, Jon Stewart, as usual, says it best:

The State Department's press operation works in mysterious ways. For instance, this short transcript just arrived in my email in box, under the grandiose headline "Remarks with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu Before Their Meeting":

QUESTION: Madam Secretary, do you expect Turkey to finally agree on sanctions against Iran?

SECRETARY CLINTON: We are working every day and making progress.

QUESTION: Thank you.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you.

I feel better informed already. For a more complete accounting of U.S-Turkish relations, see Josh Rogin's latest.

The State Department's 2010 Human Rights Report examines abuse and discrimination the world over, featuring China, Iran, and... Western Europe?

Europe is not exactly at the forefront of one's mind when thinking of places with poor human rights records. But creeping into European society are widespread and insidious anti-Muslim sentiments, says the report. These prejudices are increasingly visible across the Continent, with numerous cases last year highlighting the issue. The document puts it rather bluntly: "Discrimination against Muslims in Europe has been an increasing concern."

The biggest headline grabber was the Swiss ban of minaret construction, passed by a significant majority (57.5 percent in favor) in a popular referendum. (Notably, the ban was opposed by majorities in parliament and the Federal Council, but still won handily.) Compared to its bigger neighbors, Switzerland has a relatively tiny Muslim community, and there are only four minarets in the entire country -- making the  ban mostly symbolic. But the message, another contribution to the growing trend of Swiss hostility towards Muslims, resonated. The report further stated,

Islamic organizations have complained that authorities in many cantons and municipalities discriminated against Muslims by refusing zoning approval to build mosques, minarets, or Islamic cemeteries.

Switzerland was hardly the only country the Report criticized. France's anti-headscarf laws were criticized, as was French President Nicolas Sarkozy's claim that burqas are "not welcome" in France. In the Netherlands, right-wing politician Geert Wilders is cited for frequently stoking anti-Muslimsentiments

Italy, Germany, Britain, and most other European countries are similarly castigated for anti-Muslim hostility. 

This must have been humiliating. P.J. Crowley had to climb down today from his recent remarks about Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, in which the State Department spokesman said that Qaddafi's speech before the U.N. General Assembly amounted to "lots of words and lots of papers flying all over the place, not necessarily a lot of sense." Crowley was responding to Qaddafi's threat to declare a "jihad" against Switzerland for arresting his son, but chose to go off script.

Turns out the Libyans were not happy about Crowley's remarks, and threatened to retaliate against U.S. oil companies seeking to do business in Libya.

From today's press briefing, here's Crowley:

I want to clarify the U.S. position regarding Libya. We are strongly committed to the bilateral U.S.-Libyan relationship, and Secretary Clinton has asked Assistant Secretary Jeff Feltman to travel to Tripoli next week for a series of bilateral consultations.

Regarding the personal comments I made last week, I want to provide some context. I responded to a question regarding use of the term “jihad” in the context of relations between Libya and Switzerland. I should have focused solely on our concern about the term “jihad,” which has since been clarified by the Libyan Government. I understand that my personal comments were perceived as a personal attack on the president. As I made clear to Libyan Ambassador Ali Aujali when Assistant Secretary Feltman and I called upon him in his office on Friday, these comments do not reflect U.S. policy and were not intended to offend. I apologize if they were taken that way. I regret that my comments have become an obstacle to further progress in our bilateral relationship.

It should be noted that "progress" in ties between Libya and the United States has been pretty slow and spotty since the two countries began normalizing relations. As I reported last week, Libya experts are pretty skeptical that the country can really change -- and the reason boils down to Qaddafi, whose mercurial rule has left Libya with basically no functioning institutions. Nor is it necessarily the case that U.S. companies are desperate to do business in Libya, given the political risks. And I'd say those risks just went up.

The State Department's public-affairs shop suffers from "poor communication, lack of staffing and uneven leadership," according to the AP's Matthew Lee, who got his hands on an unreleased copy of a new inspector general's report.

And here's the juiciest bit: "[S]ome employees had been instructed not to return phone calls to reporters asking sensitive questions and ... the environment in one office was so tense and hostile that several workers fear violence."

Violence!

The report's most damaging findings involve the Office of Broadcast Services, which produces and distributes audio and video content to worldwide media outlets. That office, it said, is beset by severe morale problems and hostility between employees and managers.

It said several employees expressed concern "that violence in the workplace could result because of the high levels of workplace animosity and tension." The report called for the current director of the office to be replaced.

Another concern highlighted in the report, according to Lee, is that "the Office of Press Relations, which in previous administrations has been a primary channel for answering inquiries from the media, had lost much of its role because Clinton's team believed it was not effective." More: "Under direction from the front office, PRS does not return some reporters' calls, for inquiries that are deemed sensitive," the report said.

P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary who heads the bureau, acknowledged it was a "tough report" but said that about a third of the problems identified were already being addressed. He also denied that anyone instructed PRS not to return phone calls, but said that some questions were kicked to the front office. 

The report also noted that "the duties of some career employees in the press office had been transferred to political appointees, which contributed to low morale," but either Crowley declined to comment on that sensitive topic, or Lee didn't print his response.

I have a great deal sympathy for the folks on the other end of the line from us journalists -- I'm sure they are often overwhelmed by complicated or touchy requests every day. I know it's a constant struggle just to track down the right people and get all of our queries answered accurately. But clearly, there's room for improvement here.

The State Department cannot account for more than $1 billion it paid out to contractor DynCorp to train police during the first years of the Iraq war, in just one example of management shortcomings that have put at risk $2.5 billion worth of money spent on training policemen around the world, according to a damning new report.

The office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) especially laid into the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), known as the "Drugs and Thugs" bureau, in an audit released Monday, for mishandling DynCorp.

The report comes at an inconvenient time for DynCorp, which is also doing most of the police training in Afghanistan. The Defense Department, which is taking over that mission soon, will need contractor help, but sources tell The Cable that DOD is trying to exclude DynCorp from that contract competition over the company's vigorous protests.

Special Inspector Stuart Bowen told The Cable that since the problems at INL haven't been corrected in the years that SIGIR has been reporting on the bureau, his office is now working with Deputy Secretary Jack Lew, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's right-hand man on management issues in Foggy Bottom.

"Deputy Secretary Lew is a man who's very familiar and committed to financial management," Bowen said. "He committed to addressing them directly and ensuring that this time the promises of improvements occur."

"I'm concerned about INL's capacity to oversee large-scale projects," Bowen went on. "Whether the department [as a whole] has the capacity to ultimately do that still remains to be seen."

The SIGIR's report on INL contains many damning revelations, including the fact that the first $1 billion spent on the DynCorp contract was overseen by just one person, and that person simply approved the invoices without scrutiny. When challenged, INL couldn't produce the documentation on where that billion went, and is now trying to piece it together --a process that could take several years.

INL Assistant Secretary David Johnson declined to be interviewed about the report, but an INL spokesperson said that there are now three people in Iraq overseeing DynCorp's contract there, with four more on the way this year. The spokesperson said there is now a process in Washington to check invoices that had saved $9 million, but SIGIR isn't satisfied.

"INL continues to exhibit weak oversight of the DynCorp task orders for support of the Iraqi police training program," the report states. "INL lacks sufficient resources and controls to adequately manage the task orders with DynCorp.  As a result, over $2.5 billion in U.S. funds are vulnerable to waste and fraud."

INL disputes that $2.5 billion of funds are "vulnerable."

The report also calls into question the relationship between INL and DynCorp in Iraq. Apparently, INL was involved in negotiating leases and building rentals for DynCorp in the Baghdad international zone that somehow resulted in exorbitant rates that kept going up every year. DynCorp then just put that all on INL's tab and charged the bureau 11 percent extra in fees to boot.

The report is filled with examples of abuse and waste by DynCorp that INL paid for. In one example, $450,000 was spent to rent two generators when there were already plenty of generators to go around.

The report also details at length how SIGIR raised staffing and contract management issues with INL several times since 2005. Although INL has tried to address the problem, the results are far from satisfactory, according to SIGIR.

Lawmakers too are getting fed up with DynCorp's handling of the police training mission and INL's lax oversight.

"[INL has]been managing this contract in Iraq since 2004 and, according to this report, they have no idea where any of the money went," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO. "What's even worse is that these are the same people responsible for police training in Afghanistan, so I don't have any confidence that they're doing a better job there."

Michael Crowley has an excellent article in this week's New Republic, "Reset Button," assessing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's public breaks from official U.S. policy. He runs through her out-of-line statements on Kim Jong-il's successor in North Korea, human rights in China, and Israeli settlement-building, as well as her snapping at an audience member during her trip through Africa and calling North Korea an "unruly teenager." He questions whether these incidents were the gaffes of an independent-thinking, fallible, and very tired diplomat, or cannily constructed political statements designed in concert with the White House to express something otherwise taboo.

The article is cast in black and white, told through the dialectics of candidate and victor, ally and enemy, on message and off, either and or. Crowley opens the article describing the schizophrenic reaction to Clinton's naming as secretary; some, he argues, thought it "nuts" and some a "stroke of genius." A Democratic operative says of Clinton's out-of-bounds statements, "Sometimes that's helpful, sometimes it's not." Crowley also discusses an "old Hillary duality" -- her "disdain for the media" (making herself available for questions just once on a weeklong trip) and "occasional efforts at outreach" (bringing the hungry traveling press bagels).

Throughout, he flip-flops between calling the secretary "Hillary" and "Clinton," to heighten the point -- Hillary being the strident and frank candidate and Clinton the hyper-controlled political tact-machine.

Eventually, Crowley blows over his own either-or straw-woman, noting that the idea of Clinton as some sort of infallible policy robot is absurd. She, like all politicians, has mucked up dozens of times in the past. But he sadly doesn't plumb the idea much further.

It follows from the conception of her as a complex person that her perceived missteps are similarly complex. She speaks publicly on literally a world's worth of issues every day. She makes mistakes, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not, sometimes with effect, sometimes without. To paint with black and white is to miss a very colorful picture. And ultimately, it is the press that paints her in such egregiously schizophrenic, love-her-or-hate-her terms.

NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images

Andrew W.K. is a musician, nightclub owner, children's show host, motivational speaker, and news commentator who has penned tracks such as, "Party ‘til you Puke," "Party Party Party," "Long Live the Party," "It's Time to Party," "Party Hard," "Big Party," and "Dance Party."

He says of art and entertainment, "I want my jaw to be on the floor completely out of my comfort zone. In life we are fortunate to have comfort, so art and entertainment should take us away from that."

So, what does former Secretary of State Dean Acheson have to do with Andrew W.K.'s latest album? More than you would think. The album, '55 Cadillac, is an instrumental piano album inspired by his experience with the title car. The car, it turns out used to be owned by architect of the Cold War, Dean Acheson.  And W.K. thinks his spirit may have lingered.

"The only time the car ran well was when my wife was in it," W.K. said. "I wondered if the car was somehow... It didn't want me to own it."

He said maybe he didn't fit the idea of an ideal person to Acheson, explaining why the car didn't work for him. On the other hand Acheson did share a room with legendary composer Cole Porter in law school, so maybe he had an affinity for musicians, W.K. said. "Maybe Dean Acheson has been watching down on me," he said. "But I'm no Cole Porter."

Oddly enough, W.K.'s views on global governance aren't that far removed from Acheson's. "I am very interested in where things are headed," said W.K. who has been closely following the events at the UN. "The idea of a centralized world government, a one world civilization appeals to me."

He said he would like to see people to start identifying by planet rather than nation, pointing to the internet as a place where globalism exists, where people act more as citizens of the world.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

A week after I reported on a new Africom program meant to target terror in the Sahel region of West Africa, the State Department's press office has replied to our 10 detailed queries.

Replying to an e-mail regarding a different article, the press office resent a statement, sent separately last week by Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs Judith McHale to FP, on the U.S.-Africom relationship. (An excerpt was printed in our article here and is pasted below.)

The Department of State and Africom enjoy a strong relationship. Our shared goal is to help African nations create a more stable environment on the continent and to enable political and economic growth that benefits the people of Africa. Our relationship with Africom is similar to the relationships the Department has with other regional commands."

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense responded to both sets of queries in full by the deadline I passed along. Just sayin'.

We have received several responses to the post last week about the State Department's struggle to get security clearances for interns. The post was based on this National Journal story. Below are comments by readers identifying themselves as former interns. The consensus so far is that while the process isn't great, the clearance is important.

Matt Born, who served as an intern in Athens in 2007, responded by email, and said that he applied in May 2006, was accepted in September, had his clearance request submitted in October and received an interim clearance in January 2007: 

I was a State intern a few years ago, and found the process to be opaque and difficult.  I was offered and served as an intern in the political section in Athens, but I can vouch that the clearance process took a significant amount of time and only succeeded after they stopped pursuing top secret clearance and opted for interim secret.  I'm on my third passport, and have spent maybe 10 percent of my life overseas, but due to the opacity of the process I don't know whether that had any impact.

Regarding whether interns handle classified material, I can say that it varied.  There were times when I had to remind the FSOs that my clearance didn't go high enough to do what they were asking.  There were three other interns during my stay in Athens, and some of them never saw a coversheet.

Commenter tbeau85 agreed that access is important:

As a former overseas DOS intern, I had access to classified cables for intern projects. No intern is "running" anything but your reaction does overlook the fact that in reality, "classified" material does not always include "sexy" news. It can be simply politically sensitive discussions--access to which is necessary if an intern is to get a full experience with DOS. Even not related to direct assignments, perusing the cables everyday was one of the best experiences as an intern. If interns could only read UC material, the whole experience would not be nearly the same.

alkenn93 says he/she also received an interim clearance one week ahead of time and that the process was "incredibly difficult": 

Yes, it was extremely useful to be able to read classified cables and to attend sensitive meetings, and I wouldn't argue that interns shouldn't have to be granted secret clearance. Still, the difficulty of the process only serves to weed out eager students with relevant overseas experience, and is not proportionate to the actual amount of sensitive work we complete.

Another description of the access provided for cleared interns:

For better or worse, many areas and documents are marked as secret, and I agree that not clearing interns would rather limit their experiences. Cables, NIEs, and other documents that have classified versions offer a lot more insight into the whole process and are a neat perk of the job. Certainly, the process could be improved -- interns who applied nine months ahead of time should be told more than a week before the first day that they will, in fact, be permitted to show up for work -- but the difficulty in obtaining a clearance shouldn't detract from the value of that clearance.

Finally, commenter Guyver describes the frustration of never getting to start:

I was supposed to be a summer intern at State in 2006. I did not get my clearance till end of August, by which time summer was over. Funny thing, I was offered the internship because I have native-fluency in Arabic, but that’s what delayed my clearance, because I spent many years overseas in Arab countries.

Based on these comments, here are some further questions for discussion:

If State Department funding is increased, as has been indicated, will the problems lessen?

Are normal State hires having the same problems with clearance? Or is it easier because training and the first year doing consular leave plenty of time? 

Update: A prospective Foreign Service Officer (FSO) wrote in to explain that the clearance process for hires is just as long. She asked to have her name withheld as her employment offer is still in the clearance phase.

As someone with a conditional offer of employment as an FSO, I must note that one cannot be accepted into training without passing the Final Suitability Review, which requires both the top-secret clearance and medical clearance to be completed before the actual hiring can take place. This process takes months to complete.

I asked what prospective FSOs do for the months while awaiting clearance:

I think some people do drop out, but the process to pass the FSO exams is so arduous, and people have invested so much time and energy already, that I think most don't. Most keep working wherever they've been working, or get short-term jobs, things like that.

A great crumb from the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel: nearly four in five Americans agreed, in a Fox News poll, that former President Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea -- during which he successfully lobbied for the release of jailed journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee -- will not encourage the kidnapping of more Americans.

One comment, though. Ling and Lee -- and John Yettaw, the American released from Myanmar over the weekend -- were not kidnapped. They were arrested and put in prison. Seems an important distinction to make.

Seven months ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the powerful New York Senator, former First Lady, and runner-up in the brutally long Democratic primary competition -- became U.S. President Barack Obama's secretary of state. Since then, she's chastened North Korea, advocated on behalf of Burma, and rallied against Israeli settlement building. She's logged nearly 100,000 air miles. She's tirelessly pursued Obama's diplomatic agenda around the world.

And she's done it while fostering or demonstrating little friction with the White House she once hoped to occupy. Being secretary of state doesn't just require being a diplomat abroad. It requires being a diplomat in Washington. For, foreign policy is not and has never been the purview of State alone -- Clinton overlaps and dovetails and supports and creates policy with Obama, a spate of diplomatic envoys, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the national security advisers, Vice President Joe Biden, et cetera. By all accounts, she's done well at that as well.

Not that you'd know it reading the paper. Too often, coverage of Clinton neglects the fact that the secretary of state has never been the sole creator of U.S. foreign policy. It also, far too often, focuses hyper-intently on the perceived narrative of how Clinton feels about her relationship with the White House -- rather than the actual relationship between Clinton and Obama or how she's doing her job.

Here are some main offenders.

Two weeks ago, Tina Brown took to the pages of the Daily Beast to proclaim that "It's time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa." The article -- which makes a decent argument that Clinton's love of policy nitty-gritty means she's happy to play a supporting role -- is suffused with the speculative, the hypersensitive, and the hyperpersonal. It digresses into Clinton's relationship with her husband. And it seems shocked -- shocked! -- that Clinton might not mind being a good soldier in such a well-liked and well-run administration.

Other offenders come from less-opinionated sources.

On May 1, the New York Times' diplomatic correspondent Mark Landler published a profile of Hillary-in-situ, with the headline "Her Rival Now Her Boss, Clinton Settles Into New Role." The piece covered the secretary's tiring schedule and her jockeying for position amid other top foreign-policy thinkers in the administration.

But it also included a lot of strange diversions into Clinton's relationship with her husband and her family -- "Sad Hillary" anecdotes, as I like to call them. Take, for instance, this tart assessment of the way Clinton communicates her daughter, Chelsea: "[She] exchanges e-mail messages with her daughter, Chelsea, on her BlackBerry, which she is not allowed to use, for security reasons, at work."

Even worse was an April 1 story by the same author, about Clinton's participation at the G-20 meetings in London.  Here's the lede:

For Hillary Rodham Clinton, arriving here on Tuesday night from The Hague was a lesson in the difference between being a supremely important person and just a very important one.

Mrs. Clinton's government plane was put into a holding pattern in the skies over Stansted Airport because air traffic had been backed up by Air Force One and other planes carrying world leaders to the economic summit meeting here. Once on the ground, her blue-and-white Boeing 757 taxied past President Obama's much larger 747, parking at a respectful distance.

Does the NYT honestly think anyone's surprised that the President's plane gets to go first? And do they honestly believe that it taught Hillary Clinton a lesson? I don't think so. The piece concludes with an anecdote about how Clinton brought a bunch of the tulip varietal named for her back to her hotel room -- whereas Obama got to stay in some sort of plush castle.

Of course, Clinton's a fascinating personal figure. And of course her relationship with the White House remains a topic major news outlets need to cover. This weekend, for instance, Clinton strayed far from the White House's line on Iran, taking a much harder position than other proxies on the issue of enrichment while speaking with Meet the Press.

I look forward to reading stories on that. But such strained coverage on the made-up narrative of Clinton's dislike of the parameters of her current job? No, thank you.

Photo: Flickr user sskennel