editorial

It's good to see city officials reconsider a hasty decision

One of the most obnoxious things about political cultures in most places is that so many public officials feign infallibility. Yes, if you are an elected official and you admit error, the next time you run for office some adversary has an issue to raise. Yes, if you are an appointed functionary your office politics nemeses will likely bludgeon you with any sign of weakness. But people tend to be smarter than a lot of opportunists will acknowledge, and will give due credit for the honesty and maturity inherent in the admission and correction of a mistake.

It was a mistake for Panama City's mayor and city council to quickly accept some Avenida Central merchants' argument that the solution to the Peatonal's woes lies in the restoration of traffic there. The fallacies of the argument that the return of cars would win the competition against the malls for the Peatonal retail businesses were obvious and were pointed out by many people in the community, so City Hall reversed course and decided to study the area's problems in more detail. Good for the mayor and representantes.

The weaknesses and strengths and possibilities of the Peatonal need to be explored in much greater detail if viable actions to improve the area are to be taken. One of those details is in the political process. When Mayín Correa was mayor she had an ambitious plan that would have tied the Peatonal to a new legislative palace in the area and certain plans for the Casco Viejo. But some of those items were never within the purview of municipal government and others depended upon the continuation in office of a city administration that shared Correa's vision. Part of the Peatonal's problem was that things linked to it in the original plan just didn't happen.

Can we expect that a new group of elected officials will continue the projects of their predecessors? It would be better for the public interest if Panamanian political culture grew up to the point where the transition from opposition to government no longer included such a strong compulsion to trash everything that the preceding officials did. It would be unrealistic to plan on such an expectation.

Thus the municipal government would do well to study everything in detail and have a long-range vision of what it is trying to do, but to limit its plans and actions to what can be accomplished in the remaining two years of the mayor's and representantes' terms.

That is potentially a lot. For one example, if trashing the pedestrian mall concept and bringing back traffic is a bad idea, the creation of more parking spaces in the immediate vicinity, preferably by the construction of an enduring parking structure rather than the more temporary creation or use of vacant lots, would be a positive short-term step upon which future administrations could build.

The Peatonal has several possible promising futures, even if as a general retail competitor to the newer shopping centers is not one of the realistic ones. The area's promise is all that much brighter when we have public officials wise enough to reconsider a rash decision.

Brazen double standard ought to prompt impeachment hearings

Scooter Libby, US Vice President Cheney's erstwhile chief of staff, was convicted of perjury for lying to investigators about a vilification campaign against a critic of the US invasion of Iraq. That campaign, run out of the vice president's office with the connivance of right-wing columnist Robert Novak, included the highly illegal revelation of the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

Libby got 30 months for perjury but his stonewalling prevented a more serious prosecution for outing the CIA agent. But now George W. Bush --- a commander in chief whose subordinates have routinely used torture, including against entirely innocent people, including to the point of many deaths under torture --- calls Libby's prison sentence "excessive" and has commuted it. What it's really about is shoring up Libby's stonewall and protecting members of his administration from accountability for their acts of corruption.

The House Judiciary Committee, however, has a card to play. People can be given immunity and compelled to testify under the threat of contempt. The prosecutors' investigation of Cheney's illegal vilification campaign that Libby's lies short-circuited can be resumed in this congressional forum.

And it should be. A committee investigation about whether Vice President Cheney should be impeached is absolutely in order.

Sure, it would be unlikely that the necessary super-majority for a conviction could be mustered in the Senate. But it would be a healthy public exercise to make Republicans who support the use of torture and the curtailment of citizens' civil liberties for the supposed purpose of defending the nation show their hypocrisy by defending the revelation of national security secrets, of which the identities of undercover intelligence agents are one variety.

Bear in mind...

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

Eric Hoffer

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey

War, like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few. The cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit.

General Smedley Butler