“The majority of the propagandistic, self-proclaimed communications media, especially the electronic, will devote many hours and bytes of the available electromagnetic spectrum in concession to the “memory” of just the second of these dates: that of the tragic attack on the part of - it is said without being satisfactorily proven - the Taliban-al-Qaeda organization on the so-called “Twin Towers” which housed the global headquarters of the World Trade Center in New York.
But it’s not about this overworked - and at the same time completely unclear - September 11th, the little workhorse that keeps the most backward sectors of the political right in the United States in power, that we want to talk about. Instead, we wish to discuss the other September 11th, when the Chilean armed forces, ordered by the Commanders-in-Chief of the Army, Air Force and the Navy, the general director of Carabineros, the felons Augusto Pinochet, Gustavo Leigh, José Toribio and César Mendoza, attacked the Presidential Palace.”
While at WORLDMEETS.US, we have seen a good deal of support for John McCain in the Portuguese-speaking countries ofBrazil and Portugal, chiefly due to McCain’s promise to include Brazil in the G8 and his relatively liberal trade policies, this op-ed from Portugal’s Jornal de Negicios is decidedly concerned about what might happen under a McCain presidency.
After examining some of the specifics of McCain’s foreign policy plans, including his plans to create a “League of Democracies,” “expand NATO to include all democratic states,” exclude Russia from the G-8 and include Brazil and India, João Carlos Barradas writes for Jornal de Negocios:
“McCain’s plans are frightening in their incoherence, total lack of realism and underestimation of economic and financial constraints. … Even before Beijing or Moscow put the heat on the eventual Republican president, the apprehension of allies in Berlin, Tokyo and Riyadh would be such that either McCain will have to change course or he will condemn the United States to a proactive interventionism capable of bringing even greater misfortune.
Is it reasonable to charge Donald Rumsfeld with torture? According to this news item from France’s Rue 89, with Rumsfeld visiting Paris this week, a coterie of human rights groups in Europe and the United States filed a complaint with Paris prosecutors. According to the article, “under French law, owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, his presence there obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.”
“Legally speaking, few complaints are as irrefutable as this one. Then there is the political aspect: this touches on the Bush Administration … But there should be impunity for no one.”
– Patrick Baudoin, French Lawyer Who Filed the Complaint
By Julien Martin
Translated by Andrew Levine
October 26, 2007
France - Rue89 - Original Article (French)
At three pages and with twenty-seven appendixes, the French complaint filed on Thursday by four human rights organizations against Donald Rumsfeld is detailed and damning. The former American Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 is accused of torture, in particular with respect to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
This is the fifth complaint against the man considered one of the architects of the Iraq War. Two criminal complaints were dismissed in Germany (the second, however, will be appealed next week) and two more have been filed, one in Argentina and one in Sweden.
But for the first time, Donald Rumsfeld has been legally assaulted while in the country in which the complaint was filed. Arriving in Paris on Thursday, he gave a lecture on Friday morning, without specifying the duration of his stay. Owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and enshrined in French law ten years later, his presence here obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.
In the French complaint, which Rue89 has obtained a copy of, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Human and Civil Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights intend, “to take all preliminary measures to ensure that this person is detained or else kept on French territory.”
Testimony from former detainees and American troops fills out the complaint, which lists the alleged interrogation methods: two-day-long periods of sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, sexual humiliation, and religion-related threats, among others.
Brace yourself for the Nobel Prize being branded a vast left-wing conspiracy.
That is the kind of whining that can be expected from global warming deniers if Al Gore wins or shares the Nobel Peace Prize, as The Times of London is breathlessly speculating, for his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and his other efforts to sound the alarm.
While this would not, in my view, mean that Gore would suddenly throw his hat into the presidential campaign ring as some folks speculate and even more hope, it would be a richly ironic and well deserved smack-down of the amazing number of conservatives who are still singing from the George Bush hymnal and believe that the precipitous rise in global temperatures has less to do with greenhouse gases generated from industrialization and automobiles than cow farts.
Richly ironic because Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and endowed the prizes, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a liberal, and to the extent that the prizes can even be viewed as political, a goodly number have gone to conservative academics and scholars, notably economists.
For the record, I don’t think the Peace Prize is worth the powder to blow it up with and haven’t since it was shared by Lee Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger in 1973 for “ending” the Vietnam War.
August 20th, 2007 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz poses an interesting question: is resigned White House political maven Karl Rove a creation of the press as much of as of President George Bush?
From the moment he leaked word of his departure to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Karl Rove has been lionized and vilified by the media hordes.
He is either a political giant, shrewdly plotting a series of victories during the Bush presidency, or a nation-wrecker, sowing the seeds of division to boost the GOP. The nicknames — “Bush’s Brain,” “The Architect” — match the portrayal of an important historical figure.
But what if journalists are part of an unspoken conspiracy to inflate Rove’s importance — not for ideological reasons but because it makes for a better narrative? What if they are the architects, using well-placed aides to build a stage for inside-dope stories involving Rove and his colleagues?
Or perhaps there’s a cruder explanation: that some journalists believe Bush lacks the intellectual heft to achieve big things on his own, so they attribute his most consequential decisions to a powerful Svengali at his side.
Perhaps there is a bit of BOTH at play here — with the heaviest ingredient being what fits into a narrative.
Anyone who has worked on a newspaper knows how it goes. A conventional wisdom forms around a person or an event. Other journalists then try to build on it and find a new twist in this story or to advance the story. But what if the original story is overblown or underplayed? Future stories are built on what was written or broadcast before. MORE:
This is not to play down Rove’s crucial role as the president’s longtime confidant and chief strategist, who indeed helped engineer his election triumphs and map a governing approach that emphasized the care and feeding of Bush’s conservative base. But was Rove’s decision to quit, 17 months before the end of Bush’s term, truly deserving of lead-story status in the New York Times, The Washington Post and the three nightly newscasts?
Kurtz discusses the relatively recent rise of the political consultant as a major news figure and quotes blogger/journalism Professor Jay Rosen (one of this site’s favorite writers) on Rove. He details some of the major controversies swirling around Rove and Rove’s role itself. Then he writes:
Rove has seemed impervious to media criticism, preferring to grant interviews to conservative allies, such as the Journal’s Paul Gigot, who got the exclusive on Rove’s departure. Rove told Rush Limbaugh, in another such interview last week, that he ignores sniping by the press: “I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you’ve got a pretty sorry existence.”
In the end, Bush’s tenure will be defined by such overarching events as Iraq and Katrina, where the quality of presidential decision-making — and performance — mattered more than packaging. Even the most influential White House aides are ultimately hired help.
But part of what has happened to Rove is this:
Just as political candidates who won’t appear before the press or at debates can be “defined” others (which can work in a positive or negative way), Rove’s relatively limited access to some key reporters and some friendly conservative talk show hosts and op-ed writers meant other members of the media had to analyze from afar and draw their own conclusions about him.
This helped him greatly when things were going his way — and became a wind-blown House of Cards when things went back.
BUT lest you think Mr. Rove is retiring — think again.
It’s pretty clear that altough he supposedly resigned to spend more time with is family, his family is going to have some competition for his time.
After all the wishful thinking and political posturing on all sides, a basis for serious discussion makes the “tenuous case†for staying in Iraq while scaling down our presence.
The report urging “strategic patience†is by Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank chaired by former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, with a bipartisan board including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William S. Cohen, a former Republican Senator who was Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton.
Some recent advances in Iraq, Cordesman writes, are the result of “sheer luck,†such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents. He quotes an unnamed U.S. official as describing our situation as “three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you.”
Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman makes a case for phasing down troop levels starting early next year.
His analysis and recommendations will draw fire for being too qualified, too middle-of-the-road and politically unsatisfying. But they have the ring of reality, something so rare in the furor over Iraq that has made Americans unhappy with both the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress elected to oppose him.
Here, at least, is a starting point for facing the true options and thinking seriously about them.
As Cordesman writes, “The U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.â€
April 3rd, 2007 By MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
I don’t really care what Henry Kissinger has to say these days, but perhaps his recent comments in Tokyo deserve some consideration.
Although he remains “basically sympathetic to President Bush” with respect to Iraq — which is already enough to question his sanity and credibility — he does not think that “military victory” (defined as “total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population”) is possible. (Was it ever?) He does not support a quick U.S. withdrawal, which he claims would lead to chaos, but, overall, his recommendations for what to do now are much closer to the James Baker’s Iraq Study Group than to Bush and the neocons:
Kissinger said the best way forward is to reconcile the differences between Iraq’s warring sects with help from other countries. He applauded efforts to host an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Iraq’s neighbors — including Iran, Washington’s longtime rival in the region.
“That is the sort of framework out of which it is conceivable that an agreement should emerge,” Kissinger said. “One needs to be prepared to negotiate with adversaries.”
Kissinger said that fighting in Iraq is likely to continue for years, and that America’s national interest requires an end to partisan bickering at home over war policy.
“The role of America in the world cannot be defined by our internal partisan quarrels,” he said. “All the leaders, both Republican and Democratic, have to remember that it will go on for several more years and find some basis for common action.”
