It seems that under the Bush Administration, Chinese interrogation methods designed to elicit false confessions during the Korean War became the basis for the training of interrogators at Guantanamo (NYT).
It seems there was a certain chart used in training the interrogators came to light during June 17 hearings by the Senate Armed Services committee.
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”…
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force
study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners…..The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”(NYT)
Beyond the headlines, we occasionally get “soft” news about how the post-9/11 world really is, as we do today in disturbing narratives about the unseen wars in Iran and Pakistan–patterns of secrets and lies that Americans and their representatives in Washington either don’t fully know or want to talk about publicly.
In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh details a new “major escalation of covert operations against Iran…designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership” as part of a literal tug of war in the White House and Congress on how to deal with the nuclear threat from Tehran.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports “a secret plan to make it easer for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda,” a plan that exists only on paper as a result of Washington indecision and in-fighting.
Until the Bush Administration departs next January, it will be easy enough to blame all this dangerous confusion on their certified bunglers, but how well will successors of either party in a country that prides itself on government transparency be equipped to navigate this shadowy world of shifting alliances among violent splinter groups?
Yesterday, I wrote a column comparing–contrasting–the Vietnamese refugee crisis with the present and ongoing Iraqi refugee crisis. My comments were based mostly on personal experiences and on personal views on the issue. Most of the experiences came from a stint of military duty in 1975 at one of the Vietnamese refugee camps as a Senior Refugee Liaison Officer–a tour of duty that turned out to be one of the most fascinating and rewarding aspects of my entire Air Force career.
Coincidentally, and fortunately, today’s Los Angeles Times carried a column, “The shortchanging of Iraqi refugees,” written by Morton Abramowitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a board member of the International Rescue Committee. He also was the U.S. ambassador to Thailand (1978-81) and Turkey (1989-91). I say “fortunately” because while, as I said, my piece was based mostly on personal experience, Abramowitz column is steeped in professional knowledge and experience at the highest multinational levels in the areas of human rights, international rescue, refugees and crisis prevention missions and activities. Where else to go to both fact-check and complement my original article in such rapid succession?
Ambassador Abramowitz first provides a historic perspective on present and past refugee crises by pointing out that, “Since World War II, American actions have unintentionally created three huge refugee crises: the Indochinese in Southeast Asia, the Kurds of northern Iraq and now a third: the Iraqis displaced by today’s war.”
He then describes the professional, humanitarian and compassionate way in which the U.S. handled the Indochinese refugee crisis–“an extraordinary act“– and how the Kurdish refugee crisis was resolved.
With respect to the present Iraqi refugee crisis, the Ambassador has this to say:
Our war has displaced 4 million Iraqis since 2003, including 2 million now living beyond its borders in tough conditions. Yet we have allowed this vast, potentially destabilizing refugee burden to be borne mostly by Syria and Jordan. We have provided some aid to host countries but none to Syria, and we have allowed only a trickle of Iraqis (fewer than 10,000 so far) to resettle in the U.S. — far fewer than have been taken in by Sweden.
And,
For five years, the U.S. has failed to make Iraq’s refugee exodus a focus of national or international attention. The U.S. has allowed the crisis to be managed by concerned but second-tier American officials, and it has been slow to provide financial assistance. This year’s aid, the most generous so far, will surpass $200 million — but it is still only a quarter of what is needed, relief agencies say. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees complained last month that he would run out of funds in August.
Abramowitz then goes on to explain the differing responses to the three crises and offers some reflections. Included in the explanations are:
* The fact that White House leadership provided by Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush was good and the fact that “This time around, there has been little presidential involvement.”
* The facts that “guilt was an underlying factor in previous crises,” and that “The current Bush White House, by contrast, appears to be without guilt or remorse.”
* The fact that the media have been generally uninterested in the story of the refugees this time. “Partly because, unlike, say, Darfur, where overcrowded, grim refugee camps can be graphically portrayed, Iraqi refugees generally live in crowded quarters in the cities of Syria and Jordan, surviving on inadequate international handouts, illegal labor or declining savings — but without much visual squalor to stir sympathy.”
* The fact–as I mentioned in my story–that “9/11 changed our national consciousness as well. We became less welcoming of outsiders in general and more suspicious of Arabs and Muslims in particular.”
In his conclusion, the Ambassador addresses a couple of my rhetorical questions and issues:
The stark reality is that no U.S. government, Republican or Democrat, is going to resettle hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in the U.S. Nor is that the best solution. The best solution — as is almost always the case — is for most of the refugees to return home. They need to rebuild their lives and their country. After five years of war, violence is down and the situation offers hope for mass return, but that day has not yet come (despite the Iraq government’s recent promise to provide $195 million for returnees).
Until that time comes, they need plenty of help. In its waning days, the administration can at least provide the refugees greater financial assistance and can pressure Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to provide more than a pittance to them and to the states sheltering them.
Finally, I am pleased that the Ambassador agrees with me that “the U.S. should take in more refugees — particularly those who will simply never return to Iraq or whose savings have run out. Our values and our interests in the Middle East demand a better response.”
If I might quote myself, “Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children anxiously await our answers–answers that will reflect and perhaps redefine ‘the character of a nation.’”
Condi studies briefing paper on Al Qaeda threat; Twin towers burn
Inconveniently for the Bush administration and presidential wannabe John McCain, the historic record showing that the White House slept while Osama bin Laden and his merry band of terrorists planned the 9/11 attacks continues to grow, which effectively undercuts allegations that Barack Obama (and John Kerry before him in 2004) have dangerously naive “9/10″ mindsets.”
The GOP noise machine is working hard to drown out any mention of this record of incompetence and failure by, among other things, calling Barack Obama’s national security bona fides into question.
The presumptive Democratic nominee is catching flak for correctly asserting that federal prisons and courts worked just fine after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 in comments following last week’s Supreme Court ruling. The top court struck down as unconstitutional for the third time the rump legal system cobbled together by the White House that has resulted in indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, including many innocents swept up in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the post-9/11 frenzy, but only a small handful of prosecutions of real terrorists six-plus years later.
And now Rudy Giuliani, nicely tanned but snarky as ever after taking some time off following an ignominious crash-and-burn in a primary race predicated on his supposedly awesome national-security chops, is shilling for McCain despite his own severe case of “9/10 mindset.”
Let’s be clear from the jump that the Clinton administration does not get a free pass. This is because . . .
Author’s wife (center) with a family of South Vietnamese refugees at the Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, refugee camp in 1975
The New York Times periodically publishes an “Op-Chart” that graphically depicts the progress, or lack thereof, that we are making in Iraq. The latest Op-Chart published today (Sunday, June 22), (”The State of Iraq: An Update”) does indeed reflect progress on several fronts, including the all-important political and military fronts.
The Op-Chart analysts, however, do offer some words of caution: “Iraq remains a violent country plagued by high unemployment, raw wounds from sectarian conflict, extremist militias aided by Iran, more than four million people still displaced by violence, and very limited government capacity to meet the country’s core needs.“
It is the “more than four million people still displaced by violence” that I would like to address. These “more than four million people” include approximately 2.7 million Iraqis who have been “internally“ displaced by the raging sectarian fighting since the war began, and who now live in squalid conditions and in virtual imprisonment in their own country. The number also includes approximately two million Iraqis who have fled the carnage in Iraq, mostly to Syria and Jordan and whose plight is not much better. Up to very recently, thousands of Iraqis were fleeing their war-ravaged country every month, making this the largest diaspora in the Middle East since 1948.
While the plight of all of these human beings is horrific and needs to be addressed, it is the situation–I call it a crisis–of the Iraqi refugees abroad that affects me most deeply, because it evokes poignant memories of a muggy May morning 33 years ago at a makeshift refugee camp at a sprawling military base in Florida.
Military personnel like me and others were there to welcome South Vietnamese refugees to the United States. An article I wrote at the time describing my experience said: “The character of a nation is reflected in the faces of these volunteers. Some have flowers in their hands, some have tears in their eyes, and all have compassion in their hearts”
The “volunteers” (social workers, housewives, college students, etc.) were watching a small, fragile old woman break down in tears as she stepped off the bus that brought her and the others to the camp. Next, an exhausted young mother holding a tiny baby was followed off the bus by six more small children–the father conspicuously missing. And so it went on. Last, a young helicopter pilot stepped off with just the clothes on his back, happy to be alive. These refugees and hundreds of others like them would be placed in our care for the next six months.
That morning in 1975 was only a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, an event that precipitated a chaotic helicopter evacuation out of Vietnam. The U.S. military airlifted 6,000 desperate South Vietnamese along with about 1,000 Americans to aircraft carriers offshore. The images of crying Vietnamese women, babies in their arms, desperately reaching out to dangerously overloaded helicopters are still with us. Over the next eight months, more than 125,000 Vietnamese were warmly greeted at several “Operation New Arrivals” camps like the one in Florida.
America and Americans opened up their hearts and arms to this “first wave” of Vietnamese refugees. (Hundreds of thousands of additional Vietnamese would be given refuge in our country during the next 10 years.) Within a few months the refugees were resettled in communities throughout the U.S. Thousands were graciously welcomed by Americans into their own homes; thousands more were “sponsored” by social and welfare organizations and provided with jobs. The vast majority would become hard-working, productive, loyal and grateful residents of our country.
What does Vietnam have to do with the ongoing Iraqi refugee crisis? A great deal, I believe. But, sadly, only by way of contrast.
While our government and our nation acted so nobly at the end of the Vietnam War, our government has been singularly blasé, ambivalent and slow in responding to the Iraqi refugee crisis. While many believe that the U.S. has the moral responsibility to seriously and meaningfully tackle the Iraqi humanitarian crisis, President Bush lacks the political will and does little more than make promises and provide money for refugee assistance–a “whopping” $208 million, according to USA Today “barely one-tenth of the $2 billion that members of the International Rescue Committee‘s board believe is needed annually for up to four years.”.
Since the war in Iraq started more than five years ago, the United States has admitted fewer than 6,000 Iraqi refugees. (Small Sweden has taken in more than 9,000 Iraqi refugees since the war began.) Last year, under pressure from the United Nations and other organizations, the U.S. State Department promised to allow 7,000 Iraqi refugees to enter the United States. Only 1608 were resettled. Since October 2007, only about 4,700 Iraqi refugees have been allowed to enter the United States.
Murtaja Kamal Aldeen is one of those 4,700 fortunate Iraqis. This Sunday’s New York Times tells how the 26-year-old Baghdad University dentistry graduate left everything back home to “escape a nightmare” that included death threats because he had worked for an American organization.
As in Vietnam, there are thousands of other not-as-fortunate Iraqi men and women who risked their lives by working with U.S. military and government officials, who believed our promises, and who now find themselves the targets of terrorists, insurgents and militia groups.
At least, there are small quotas for these Iraqis–whether they will be filled is another matter. The administration has allocated 12,000 slots for such Iraqi refugees this year–and is very slow in filling them.
But how about the two-million-plus Iraqis who are languishing in Syria, Jordan and elsewhere? Will we welcome hundreds of thousands of them as we welcomed the South Vietnamese? Doesn’t the U.S. as an invading and occupying nation bear some responsibility for the crisis? Or, do we agree with former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton’s position that “our obligation was to give [Iraqis] new institutions and provide security…” and that we don’t “have an obligation to compensate [Iraqis] for the hardships of war.”?
How have Sept. 11 and the war on terror changed our attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims? What are our security concerns when it comes to such refugees? The administration claims, and perhaps rightly so, that it has to be careful to weed out potential terrorists when processing the refugees. They also claim that admitting large numbers of Iraqis would just make their return to Iraq more difficult when Iraq is finally “liberated.”
More than 4,100 of our troops have sacrificed their lives to, as we are told, give Iraqis some measure of security, liberty and democracy. But, are these very same Iraqis not “good enough” to be let into our country?
Americans must address these questions and issues soberly and pragmatically, but hopefully also with some compassion. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children anxiously await our answers–answers that will reflect and perhaps redefine “the character of a nation.”
(The author served as a Senior Refugee Liaison Officer at the Eglin Air Force Base Vietnamese Refugee Center during “Operation New Arrivals” in 1975, and was responsible for the reception, processing, housing, health and welfare and assistance with the resettlement of over 600 South Vietnamese refugees)
GERMAN POWs CAPTURED BY U.S. TROOPS; PROFESSOR JOHN YOO
I have not supported calls to oust John Yoo from his tenured position at the UC Berkeley School of Law because of his despicable and key role in the Bush administration torture regime, but after reading his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this week I am changing my mind. This is because the man who wrote the infamous memo justifying the use of Nazi-like torture techniques is so willfully ignorant.
Yoo noted in the op-ed that last week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been portrayed as a stinging rebuke of the administration’s antiterrorism policies:
“From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.”
Okay, let’s file that under the category of “strong opinion,” but what comes a little further down is absolutely mind blowing for a man who teaches at one of the nation’s leading law schools.
Yoo wrote that:
“In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners houses in the U.S.
” . . . Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge’s view on how much ‘proof’ is needed to find that a ’suspect’ is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather ‘evidence,’ which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from ‘witnesses,’ and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.”
Of course no civilian court reviewed the cases of those Germans because they were prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions and tried by traditional military courts. They were extended habeas rights and, by the way, protected from harsh interrogation techniques, among other unpleasantries.
Yoo, of course, used legal mumbo jumbo to argue that detainees at Guantánamo Bay could be tortured because they were considered to be enemy combatants, a classification created by fevered administration minds, and not covered by the conventions and other international laws under a rump legal and detention system codified in the Military Commissions Act. This was the law that the Supremes struck down for the third time as being out of legal bounds because of its suspension of habeas corpus and the act’s other kangaroo court trappings.
As Cernig at Newshoggers, among other commentators note, had Guantánamo detainees had POW status, there in all likelihood already would have been dozens of trials — not the paltry mere handful because of the mess the Bush administration has made of its role in the Global War on Terror. Those found guilty would have been sentenced, some perhaps to death, and we wouldn’t have the sniveling John Yoo with his blindered knowledge of history and sycophancy to contend with.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index and links to recent torture-related posts.
You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised. – GIL SCOTT-HERON
Perhaps the biggest disconnect between the core conservative tenet that the less government and the less obtrusive government the better and the actions of our president, who turned out to be such a faux conservative, are his unprecedented power grabs over the last seven years.
When taken as a whole these power grabs are nothing less than revolutionary in the most uncomplimentary sense of that word since the greatest fear of the Founding Fathers was that the young republic would backslide into an imperial presidency.
That has come to pass some 230 years later with the substantial help of a cowed Congress and a public living in fear, apathy or a combination of the two, and was on display last week when the Supreme Court ruled for no less than the third time — the first two rulings having been more or less ignored — that the Military Commissions Act legislating a rump legal system for detaining and prosecuting enemy combatants was out of legal bounds.
This, a 5-4 majority of justices reasoned, was because of the act’s suspension of habeas corpus and other kangaroo court trappings which denied terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay the key legal right embedded in the Constitution.
One could logically assume that the War on Terror is being fought to preserve the Great Writ and the other foundation stones of American democracy, but the Bush administration has used the GWOT in a bald-faced effort to undermine those foundation stones and shore up its imperial presidency. In the process it has tracked down and incarcerated, let alone tried and convicted, remarkably few of the truly dangerous jihadists while wrongfully imprisoning dozens or possibly hundreds of petty crooks, goatherds and other innocents — and then throwing away the key.
Europe this week bade President Bush farewell - and if it was a fond farewell, it is because they know he’s leaving not only Europe, but the corridors of American power.
The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law. – JUSTICE KENNEDY
The mere notion that The Great Writ should not apply to the people that a presidential administration views to be enemies is so un-American that it still boggles the mind that George Bush, Dick Cheney and their minions have done that very thing by using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext and part of a larger imperial power grab unprecedented in presidential history. And have pretty much gotten away with it.
A conspicuous exception is an odoriferous law passed at the White House’s insistence by a cowed and compliant Congress known as the Military Commissions Act, which the Supreme Court ruled for the third time yesterday is out of legal bounds because of its suspension of habeas corpus and other kangaroo court trappings.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-4 ruling that broke down along partisan lines, declared that terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay have constitutional rights and can appeal their cases to civilian courts.
Kennedy’s opinion — which was a reflection of the fears of the majority that innocent people could be confined indefinitely without due process, even for the rest of their lives — was a deft balance between civil liberties and national security concerns. The dissenters seemed genuinely horrified that if detainees were allowed their day in court information could come out that would help their brother terrorists and worst yet, information could come out that would lead to their release, a concern that is mitigated by the reality that no one can predict how those civilian courts will respond to the appeals.
For what it’s worth, the ruling would have been 6-3 if Sandra Day O’Connor, who in 2004 declared that “A state of war is not a blank check for the president,” was still on the court.
In any event, it was a timely reminder of the great mischief that a President McCain, who was one of the prime movers behind the detainee act, would work in filling future high court vacancies given that the two current justices he says he most idealizes are right-wing extremists Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.
For his part, Scalia wrote in his dissent to the ruling that it is a “game of bait-and-switch . . . [that] plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief and will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” He also claimed that 30 detainees who had been voluntarily released from Guantánamo by order of the Bush administration had returned to “the battlefield,” which means that in his draconian mind even people deemed innocent in the administration’s view are actually guilty.
Yes, you read that right.
The consequences of the ruling are indeed huge, if limited to what the president and Congress can do, something that Scalia willfully ignores in his rebuke, while there are three aspects of the ruling in particular that are being little commented on:
June 12th, 2008 by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor
In case you missed it — and, well, most of us did — President Bush gave an interview to The Times (U.K.) in Slovenia the other day during which he admitted that, well, things haven’t all gone well during his presidency:
President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran.
In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”
Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”
Almost enough to arouse one’s sympathy for the man, no?
Well, no, not really.
Look, I don’t think Bush is the pure evil he is often made out to be, and I’m sure there’s a side to him that is more genuinely humane than the macho image of himself he so often presents to the world. And I’m sure that the loss of so many of America’s young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan — his wars, that is, particularly the former — arouses that more humane side.
Also, I’m sure that, in terms of the Iraq War (and of his foreign policy generally), he has been motivated by noble aims (alongside the ignoble ones). It isn’t just about oil and Amerian hegemony for him. In that sense, he isn’t like Cheney or Wolfowitz or Libby or Feith or the neocon warmongers who all along have demanded war, war, and more war. There’s a scene recounted at the beginning of Hubris, the excellent book about the selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, where Bush, on the South Lawn of the White House with Ari Fleischer and some communications staffers, responds to being told about gadfly reporter Helen Thomas’s questions about a possible war with Iraq with this sudden stream of righteous passion: “Did you tell her I don’t like m—–f—ers who gas their own people? Did you tell her I don’t like a–holes who lie to the world? Did you tell her I’m going to kick his sorry m—–f—ing ass all over the Mideast?”
Therein, I think, lies the essence of the man, in all its contradictions. He believes in the eternal struggle between good and evil. He believes that he is on the side of justice. He believes that he has a responsibility to wage war against injustice. And, of course, he was right about Saddam — that is, he was right about him to the extent that Saddam was a brutal dictator who committed genocide against his own people (obviously, he wasn’t right about Saddam’s alleged WMD capabilities, or about Saddam’s allegedly imminent threat to American interests). Read the rest of this entry »
“In light of what has happened since 2003, it’s easy to say today that some examples of the always admired American press (The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek, and others) could have been more critical … But in this debate, it’s just as easy to lose sight of the kind of ‘collective psychological moment’ so detectable in the United States in the months that followed the attacks of September 11. In this very complex field of the relationship between means of communication and the public - in which only those without their thinking caps on would claim is a one-way street - one can also say that today, some of the main organs of the American press mirror rather than mold behavior.”
May 30th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
It began this week. On May 26, 2008, passengers over the age of 18 are now required to show a U.S. federal
or state-issued photo ID that contains one’s
name,
date of birth,
gender,
expiration date
“and a tamper-resistant feature.”
IDs include U.S. passport,
U.S. passport card ,
DHS “Trusted Traveler” cards (NEXUS, SENTRI, FAST),
DHS-designated enhanced driver’s license,
Drivers Licenses
or other state photo identity cards issued by Department of Motor Vehicles (or equivalent) that meet REAL ID benchmarks (All states are currently in compliance)
Non-US/Canadian citizens are not required to carry their passports if
they have documents issued by the U.S. government such as Permanent Resident Cards.
Those who do not should be carrying their passports while visiting the U.S.
This standardization of the list of accepted documents better aligns TSA with other DHS components, including Customs and Border Protection, and REAL ID benchmarks.
As of this week, passengers who do not present an acceptable ID may be subject to additional screening.
Um, not sure what ‘additional screening’ means exactly. But if you’ve ever had to put your little bare tootsies or your big black-socked feet in the footprints painted on the floor of security check at the terminal, or been wanded, or had all your luggage rifled through by an unsmiling person who looks far more suspcious a character than you do… then you know, that you can well miss your flight and lose a pile of money on a non-refundie ticket or miss your paying gig ten cities over, or not be able to kiss you great-great-great grandma goodbye before she expires.
In the main, this is what bewilders most: “This standardization of the list of accepted documents better aligns TSA with other DHS components, including Customs and Border Protection, and REAL ID benchmarks….” That instead of living our lives, and flying cross-country or out of the country in order to be with friends and family and work, and instead of our government giving any thought to what ‘pursuit of happiness’ actually means, not just happiness, but freedom from oppressive interferances…
well, just how on earth did we ever get put in the position of living our lives so as to better align our one precious life with whatever TSA wants, TSA gets.
I’m not talking about the people who work for TSA. As it is said, they are only following orders. But, from where I stand–er, sit– as a frequently sqwished between two huge men in the middle seat, flier… I think most air travelers have probably already made up some choice names for what the initials TSA really stand for.
For me, I think Time Squandered Awesomely, might be a good start.
When and if Barack Obama takes the oath of office as President of the United States, who most will he owe that high privilege to?
According to Alexandre Adler, one of France’s leading historians, journalists - and according to many - a neocon, that person would be George W. Bush. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dutch people, as most Europeans, have traditionally been very close to and supportive of the United States and of Americans–politically, economically, militarily, philosophically and in just about every other manner. Especially after World War II, Americans were beloved, almost idolized. I know, because I lived in The Netherlands and its Antilles for seven years shortly after the War.
On 9/11, those ties grew closer and deeper and remained that way even after the United States attacked the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 tragedy and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But things changed when the U.S. invaded Iraq.
Today, over five years later, while the Dutch still have approximately 2,000 troops serving in Afghanistan under the NATO umbrella, most Dutch people consider the war in Iraq to be a big mistake and disapprove of President Bush’s Iraq war policies.
Even in Afghanistan, where the Dutch are fighting and dying, many feel that the Netherlands, albeit a small country, should have more influence in the strategy for that war and that the Netherlands has been too “subservient” to Washington.
At least that is what the well known Dutch journalist and columnist H.J.A. Hofland says in a recent article, in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. According to him, “The Netherlands has, for more than five years, been the faithful, little follower of the most powerful man in the world, who has in the meantime actively proven to be the worst president.”
As the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, accompanied by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ben Bot. prepares to visit President Bush on June 5, Hofland is critical of both the Bush international policies and of the Dutch government’s “submissiveness“: “For more than five years now, we have been virtually uncritical of the most powerful nation in the world, which under President Bush’s administration is conducting two debilitating wars and in doing so has steadily lost power and respect.”
Hofland calls the upcoming visit to Washington, an “Expedition to Washington” and writes about it, and about the ongoing U.S. primaries, as follows:
By H.J.A Hofland
Translated by Dorian de Wind
May 21, 2008
In just about two weeks the Netherlands’ Prime Minister Balkenende and Minister Verhagen will visit President Bush in Washington to talk about world affairs. Six months later the American elections take place. Read the rest of this entry »
After six years at Guantanamo Bay prison, the only journalist yet to be incarcerated there, Sami Al-Hadj, was released last week. The case of Mr. Al-Hadj, who was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, has sparked renewed outrage around the world.
It’s not easy reading for an American, but a good sampling of the emotion in the Arab world over the case can be found in this article from Algeria’s French-language Le Quotidien d’Oran.
“The United States is indeed a democracy: Within its own borders, the rule of law is enshrined. But beyond its walls, only the law of the jungle prevails. Read the rest of this entry »
Could the Northern Alliance - America’s allies who helped bring down the Taliban Government in 2001 and bring Hamid Karzai to power - be behind the brazen attempt on his life during a military parade last week?
“Who was behind the April 27 attempt on the life of the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and what did they have to gain? Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Moyers did his best last night on PBS to put Barack Obama’s controversial pastor into perspective. He succeeded in showing the man’s brilliance but created unease in an observer who, by taste and temperament, is not attracted to apocalyptic preaching about the human condition.
From the interview, it’s easy to see what Obama found in Jeremiah Wright and his church that gave a new dimension to his secular desire to help the poor and dispossessed during his early days in Chicago.
Wright’s church apparently did and does good work in uplifting its community, but the social benefits come with a moral price–the preacher’s selective view of good and evil in the political world.
Consider Wright’s use of Martin Luther King to justify his own history. “Dr. King, of course, was vilified,” he told Moyers, asserting that, after King talked about racism, militarism and capitalism, he was “ostracized not only by the majority of Americans in the press; he got vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds…He was vilified by all of the Negro leaders who felt he’d overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war.”
Martin Luther King’s opposition to the war made him unpopular with Lyndon Johnson but not the rest of America, least of all African-Americans and, unlike Wright, he did not use it to condemn all of American history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to plotting drug addiction in black communities.
The Rev. Wright’s need to “damn” America leads him to a peculiar view of history. He goes back centuries to mine our national past for evil but, when asked about Louis Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic speech, dismisses it with “That was twenty years ago” and praises him for getting African-Americans off drugs and giving them self-respect.
Perhaps most troubling of all is his smiling intimation that Barack Obama is only distancing himself from his views for political expedience: “(W)hat happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I’m a pastor.”
What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.
Now Obama’s pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:
“I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?”
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn’t being doing more for them than to keep Obama’s embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.
But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.
If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama’s unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.
I have not supported calls to oust John Yoo from his tenured position at the UC Berkeley School of Law because of his despicable and key role in the Bush administration torture regime, but after reading his 
