QUOTE: "We're building a nearly $40-billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever."
Sarah Palin on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 in St. Louis, Mo.
Palin exaggerates status, cost of pipeline
False
In the vice presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin repeated claims she has made from time to time about a plan to build a natural gas pipeline in Alaska.
After arguing the wisdom of the chant, "Drill, baby, drill" — heard frequently at McCain-Palin rallies — she followed up with this:
"Even in my own energy-producing state we have billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean, green natural gas. And we're building a nearly $40-billion natural gas pipeline — which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever — to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets."
It certainly would be something to boast about if Alaska had started building a natural gas pipeline under Palin. The state has been trying to get a pipeline built from its natural gas-rich North Slope for some three decades.
But her claim is premature. We've scrutinized her claims on the pipeline before (see our review of her claim about the cost here and a look at the status of the project here) and found them less than accurate.
Palin did spearhead a plan under which TransCanada Corp., a Canadian company, will get $500-million in state funds to design and seek approvals for the pipeline. But they are not obligated to build it. Financing and approvals are far from certain, and the company can back out even if those contingencies come through.
TransCanada does not anticipate construction beginning until at least 2015, and several experts we spoke to were skeptical that the company's plan would come to fruition.
"I'll believe it when I see it," said Sarah Ladislaw, a fellow specializing in Western Hemispheric energy issues at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Palin has repeatedly mischaracterized the agreement with TransCanada. In a news conference in Alaska on Aug. 1, 2008, she said the state never before had "commitments to build this line. Now we do."
In its news story the next day, the Anchorage Daily News wrote: "That's incorrect. TransCanada has not promised to actually build the gas line, one of the state's grandest and most frustrated economic development dreams."
Now what about Palin's claim that the pipeline would cost "nearly $40-billion"? We're not sure where she got that figure — neither her office in Alaska nor the McCain campaign has ever returned our calls to tell us. TransCanada estimates the cost at $26-billion.
Yes, there could be cost overruns. But experts were skeptical the price could reach Palin's estimate.
Palin was certainly wrong that the pipeline would be the "most expensive infrastructure project ever." What we suspect she meant to say — and has said repeatedly in the past — is that it would be the most expensive privately funded infrastructure project ever.
But she's probably wrong on that count, too. We talked to several experts in pipelines and large-scale engineering projects, who said the only private infrastructure project on the scale of Palin's proposed pipeline was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, an oil pipeline also from the North Slope that is often referred to as the Alaska Pipeline. The Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977 at a cost of $8-billion. In 2007 dollars that would be just over $27-billion, edging out Palin's proposed natural gas pipeline.
While there are plans on the drawing board to build a pipeline, and Palin moved them forward in certain respects as governor, her claim in the debate suggests construction is underway, when that's not true. And she overstated the estimated cost of the project. We find her claim to be False.
QUOTE:"If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed."
Sarah Palin on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 in the New York Sun
Iran ain't Miami Beach, but beatings and killings for immodesty? No
False
In arguing for a hard line against Iran, Gov. Sarah Palin invoked not just that country's uranium-enrichment efforts and attitude toward Israel, but also its treatment of women.
"It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens," Palin wrote in a Sept. 22, 2008, opinion piece in the New York Sun. "By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens. If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed."
We've looked elsewhere at how candidates from both parties have strayed from the truth in their tough rhetoric about Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Now let's check Palin's grasp of the consequences of improper head-covering.
Restrictions in Iran go back centuries, but the strength of enforcement has varied. Modesty has been a component of Islam since the Prophet Mohammed revealed purported advice on the subject from God in the seventh century. It has been interpreted differently among and within Muslim cultures around the world, including Iran. In 1936, Iran's largely secular ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi, intent on modernizing the country, banned the practice of wearing the veil, known in the Muslim world as hejab.
That law was rescinded after Pahlavi was forced to relinquish power in 1941, but the policy of discouraging and disparaging hejab remained, said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian anthropologist and a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law.
In the 1960s, many women did not go to college because they would be forced to remove their hejab, Mir-Hosseini said.
"They were caught between tradition and resistance on the one hand and education and modernity on the other," she said. "Many women took up hejab in the early 1970s as a sign of protest."
An Islamic revolution overthrew Pahlavi's son in 1979 and instituted a 180-degree turn with respect to hejab, mandating it in 1983. The punishment for breaking that law was imprisonment or 70 lashes of flogging. The penalty was changed in 1988 to a fine and imprisonment of one to two months.
"It has been really rare that it has been applied," Mir-Hosseini said. "It goes so much against people's sense of justice and public order in Iran. But at the same time the radicals, the hard-liners, the hejab is so central to them. It is not only religious, it is anti-Western."
Hejab remains mandatory today. The custom has evolved under the influence of modern fashion, though. Some Iranian women still wear the chador, a full-length garment, often black, that fully covers their hair and drapes over their entire body. But many might wear colorful, tight-fitting overcoats, long boots, and a light scarf that covers only a token amount of their hair.
The government has periodically cracked down on dress it does not consider conservative enough, typically for a month or so as the weather warms in the summer. In recent years, though, the crackdown has persisted, as hard-liners such as Ahmadinejad have gained influence. Generally, women who are stopped are told to cover up, or asked to sign an agreement to cover up more in the future, or perhaps fined or even arrested. There have been regular reports of confrontations between the police and women who resent being hassled for alleged immodesty.
And yes, there have been accounts of brutality by police against some women after such stops. In defending Palin's statement, the McCain campaign pointed us to three such accounts, one from the Asia Times, one from the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and a third from the Economist of Aug. 25, 2007.
The latter said: "Much of the police action has been accompanied by complaints of brutality, and in many cases by documentary evidence such as graphic footage of beatings, posted on dissident Web sites."
There's an important caveat to make here, though. The beatings are not administered by the government as punishment for an improper hejab — that was outlawed in 1988. Rather they are imposed in the course of an arrest and are generally due to resistance, according to the vast majority of news accounts we read and our interviews with experts on Iran. (Similarly, plenty of protesters in the United States are arrested, but it would be innaccurate to say they're arrested for protesting — in fact they're arrested for other offenses, such as ignoring police requirements about where to protest, or disrupting traffic.)
"For some of the younger people, this (defying modesty rules) is a way of protesting. They get away with it as long as they can. But usually the punishment for that is just paying fines," said Faegheh Shirazi, an Iranian women's rights advocate, professor of Middle-Eastern Studies at the University of Texas and author of the forthcoming book, Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women's Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism. "When the police come, you have to abide by what they say. I'm sure if the woman resists and starts backfiring, there would be some struggle."
To the extent that there are beatings, they are extrajudicial, said Elizabeth Rubin, an expert on Middle Eastern culture at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you are showing too much hair you may be asked to fix your scarf," she said. "You would not generally be beaten or killed except by a crazy zealot outside the law."
To be sure, Iran has been widely criticized by human-rights organization