The Moderate Voice encourages and applauds weblogs that use this new infotechnology to go beyond offering what are in effect long op-ed pages to its readers offer original reporting content as well.
And once again we MUST point to The Talking Dog which proves to be thinking man’s best friend with yet another delicious original Q&A involving the war on terror. This time his interview is with Trevor Paglen.
As usual, we’d ruin it by taking it out of context so we’re offering you a small part of the introduction and one question and answer:
Trevor Paglen is currently a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the co-author (with A.C. Thompson) of “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA Rendition Flights”, the first book to systematically investigate the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, whereby suspected terrorists are simply kidnapped by the CIA without trial or any due process whatsoever and frequently detained and interrogated (invariably under torture), either by the CIA itself or by cooperative third countries. Messrs. Paglen and Thompson ostensibly “reverse engineered” the program using data collected by “planespotters”, accounts of those few men who have been released from the CIA “black prison” network and foreign dungeons in such locations as Afghanistan, Morocco, Syria and elsewhere, and through investigating stateside CIA front companies, from rural airfields in North Carolina to suburban law offices in Massachusetts and Nevada. Mr. Paglen’s academic interests include “black sites” (secret military bases) and prison expansion.
Here’s one exchange:
The Talking Dog: Congress has now more or less gone along and institutionalized torture and its use in the Military Commissions Act (along with stripping habeas corpus). How important do you think it is that the new, Democratically controlled Congress, try to reverse this? Do you see any real public outcry, or political pressure to do so?
Trevor Paglen: This is a hard question. Yesterday, Arlen Spector and Pat Leahy introduced a bill that they called the “habeas corpus restoration act.” I find it hard to see this as a big step forward. It actually makes me very nervous that this is a “progressive” idea… that in the year 2006, we are debating the applicability of a convention that has been fundamental to modern notions of justice since at least the 13th Century.
And then there is the question of whether it will even pass. It is certainly hard to divine the future, but the problem with things like the Military Commissions Act and similar laws is that once done, things like that are very often hard to undo; indeed, history shows that it is very hard to undo things like that.
Note what the Bush Administration did earlier this year with the 14 “high value” terror suspects from the black sites when it moved them to Guantanamo Bay. It was both ingenious and chilling. The Administration issued a challenge to Congress, and to the American people. Every one knows that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a bad guy. The choice was that the government could leave him incommunicado, and continue torturing him… or to find a way to try him and imprison him. But evidence obtained from him is tainted by illegal things,,, so to put him on trial, it was necessary to retroactively legalize what was already done to him!
That’s extraordinarily frightening: a government that says– either institutionalize and legitimize torture, or we will release an extremely dangerous terrorist. And yet, this seems to be the whole basis of how the war on terror is being conducted.
Read the entire post.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.