Daily Archives: December 3, 2004

That’s one helluva conspiracy

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The Enron-related criminal cases just seem to get more bizarre by the day.

This Chronicle article reports that the Enron Task Force has named 114 unindicted co-conspirators in the Task Force’s criminal case against former Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Richard Causey.

The Task Force has apparently set a record with the number of its named co-conspirators. The next largest number of co-conspirators named in a case that anyone can recall is the one involving former Louisiana governor, Edwin Edwards, where the government named 61 co-conspirators.

Messrs. Lay and Skilling are requesting that the Court require the Enron Task Force to disclose the identities of the alleged co-conspirators so that their counsel can talk with them in preparation of their defense. However, the purpose of the Task Force’s abuse of naming such a large number of co-conspirators is transparent — they want to chill any potential witness for Messrs. Lay, Skilling and Causey from testifying during their upcoming trial.

The tactic worked like a charm for the Task Force in the recently completed Nigerian Barge trial, in which none of the two dozen or so co-conspirators who had not already copped a plea deal with the government testified during the trial. All of those alleged co-conspirators asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege.

However, that the tactic works does not make it right. Given the apparent lack of adult supervision in the Enron Task Force in making these types of decisions, here’s hoping that the federal judges involved will provide it for them.

If not, one has to wonder how Messrs. Lay, Skilling and Causey are supposed to mount an effective defense when the 100 or so people who worked most closely with them are effectively precluded from testifying on their behalf?

Golf’s Jackie Robinson

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Argus Hamilton is a funny fellow, as reflected by this entry from his daily observations from November 30:

Annika Sorenstam competed with the men in the Skins Game Saturday. Last year at the Colonial she broke the barrier and became the first woman to play in a PGA tournament. Somehow you knew the Jackie Robinson of golf would be a Swedish blonde.

Seize the moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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Longtime Houstonian and former Secretary of both the State and Treasury Departments, James A. Baker III, opines in this NY Times op-ed that the time is now to begin substantive discussions for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he provides some concrete thoughts on how to accomplish that goal:

Stability in Iraq and peace between Palestinians and Israelis can be pursued at the same time. In fact, working toward the latter improves the chances of attaining the former. . .
The so-called quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations), which has been working on a “road map” for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis for several years, supports a two-state solution, as do the vast majority of both Palestinians and Israelis. President Bush certainly favors this goal, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel has publicly supported it as well, . . .
So the real question is how to take advantage of this window of opportunity to achieve that two-state solution. Specifically, what steps should be taken? Who needs to do what?
First, it is critical that negotiations resume. For this to happen, of course, Israel must have a negotiating partner on the Palestinian side. That partner will best emerge from free elections. Elections have been scheduled for Jan. 9, and all who support peace between Israel and the Palestinians have an obligation to do all within their power to see that those elections are successfully held.
Palestinian candidates should clearly and unequivocally renounce terrorism as a means of achieving a political result – and call upon their supporters to do likewise. And those Palestinians should commit themselves to an unequivocal, good-faith effort to crack down on terrorist groups that make a target of Israel.
In exchange, Israel should announce that upon the election of a Palestinian negotiating partner, it is prepared to resume substantive negotiations for peace without requiring that all terrorist activities cease in advance. To require the absence of any terrorist act in advance simply empowers the terrorists themselves to prevent the resumption of peace negotiations.
The United States should itself clearly embrace and articulate the unequivocal, good-faith standard for the resumption of dialogue. The United States should further prevail upon Israel to cease settlement activity in the occupied territories pending Palestinian elections and during the resumption of peace negotiations. Washington should also do everything else that it can to encourage both sides to resume meaningful talks. And it should serve, where necessary, as a direct participant in the talks, offering suggestions, brokering compromises and extending assurances.
We cannot, of course, prejudge the final outcome of any talks. But the plan presented by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 – and rejected by Yasir Arafat – surely offers one plausible place to start.
While the United States cannot dictate the terms of peace to either party, it can and should actively promote the resumption of negotiations. The time to start is now.

Read the entire piece. Mr. Baker is certainly correct that conditioning talks on the cessation of terrorist attacks simply empowers the radical Islamic fascists whose only goal is the destruction of Israel.
However, the legacy of failed negotiations with Arafat is the fact that he supported such attacks, on one hand, while negotiating with Israel on the other. The lack of trust that resulted from that duplicity has permeated Israeli-Palestinian relations for the past generation. Whether the new Palestinian leadership is capable of standing up to the forces within its leadership that foment that lack of trust will ultimately be the key element to the success or failure of any new initative.

Bonds took steroids

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This San Francisco Chronicle article reports that Barry Bonds, one of the best baseball players of all-time, admitted to a grand jury that he had taken steroids and human growth hormone.
The typical media reaction to this development will be self-righteous outrage, but I find my reaction to be one of sadness. I mean, how sad is it that one of baseball’s all-time greats resorted to illegal and dangerous drugs to enhance his career? Well, probably about as sad as the fact that supposedly secret grand jury testimony ends up on the front page of the local paper. Even sadder (and not even mentioned by the mainstream media) is that there is no study that has been done to date that indicates there is any competitive advantage to be gained by use of anabolic steroids in baseball. In other words, it is clearly cheating, but it may not actually enhance performance even though Bonds’ career statistics may be anecdotal evidence of enhancement.
Also lost in the media firestorm over the revelations about Bonds is the even sadder stories of Jason Giambi, the former MVP who now has serious health issues that are likely a result of his steroid use and of his brother Jeremy, who has also admitted to using steroids but whose baseball performance has eroded dramatically while he has been taking them. Consequently, apart from the mainstream media’s drumbeat to implicate the stars with steoroids, the real substantive story here may be that using steroids is unrelated to top-tier performance in baseball. At very least, the net effect of baseball players using steroids remains decidedly unclear.
The bottom line on all of this is that professional sports in general, and Major League Baseball in particular, has not done a good job of drawing the line with regard to what should constitute illegal use of drugs and other alleged performance enhancing substances. As a result, the league rules (as well as our nation’s laws) governing which substances are legal and illegal are often arbitrary and hypocritical. Indeed, the libertarian part of me tends toward the position that true freedom means that professional athletes are ultimately responsible for their physical condition and that they should assess the risks and costs of such activities themselves.
Moreover, professional sports teams (as well as their fans) often encourage their players to risk their health. Players who “play with pain” are the subject of adulation in all levels of sport, as are players who risk injury by running into walls, taking cortisone shots to be able to perform with reduced pain (see Roy Oswalt this season), and undergoing risky surgeries to lessen pain in order to play in a big game (see Curt Schilling in the World Series).
Consequently, the difference between a ballplayer taking pain-reducing drugs to get through a season and a slugger using performance enhancing drugs in an attempt to be more productive is not as wide as it may appear on first glance.
If cooler heads prevail, professional sports should address this public relations fiasco by commissioning a study that would determine in a clinical fashion the impact, if any, that steroid use has on athletic performance. Then, in a manner that is sensitive to the rights of all parties involved, Major League Baseball should use the findings of the clinical research to establish a clear regulatory system governing the use of all types of performance enhancing drugs. Perhaps then the mainstream media would even begin to address the issues in a balanced manner rather than the inflammatory style that it currently uses on the subject to sell newspapers.
As to the possibility of this mess being handled in such a manner? Next to zilch. So it goes.