I don't have time to write much commentary on this one but please just read the articles listed below and ask yourself one question: Who is the real threat in this, as Borat so eloquently put it, "War of Terror"?
Flunky Islamist Jihadist Terrorists get convicted of an impossible crime
Myth Busting a Terrorist Plot
This is a quote from President Bush that has been repeated many times by himself and his staff, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The original and full quote came from a press conference in 2006 which is on the White House website, "I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it -- and I will not authorize it." That sounds like a pretty definitive statement, and it has been repeated several times over the years by the administration. Yet again though, we are hearing of more proof that he is lying through his teeth. This story broke late yesterday and underlines that these are not isolated incidents perpetrated by a few renegade M.P.'s at the prison. This is a systematic pattern that has served to inflame passions of anti-Americanism around the Muslim world.
Turns out that taking Statistics maybe wasn't such a waste of time after all. Scott, I am poaching this
link. Sorry man, but I do give you full credit.
"You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there's one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it's this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe."
Alright, so its been awhile since we have heard from the boogey man, but he finally made himself known. Thanks to BBC, who has the balls to publish his missives in full, instead of commentating on fragments of what he says. Anyway, most of his threats this time are directed at several European entities, including the EU, the Pope and Dutch newspapers, for publishing depictions of the Prophet Mohammed which is against Islamic law. Now I don't care to applaud anyone who intentionally inflames international tensions, but there is something inspiring about how the Dutch newspapers have responded to this threat. The author of these cartoons has had his life threatened and the response was to republish the cartoons, basically a big F.U. to terrorists around the world. The Dutch Government responded by saying that the threat of Bin Laden was not going to change anything about their security measures, saying "its nothing new". In general, it appears that Europe is not terribly concerned about this threat, giving America a dose of shame for crapping our pants every time someone tries to sneak a knife onto an airplane. Let's take a look at how to be brave, from those cowardly Europeans who resisted our invasion of Iraq in the first place.
Ok, I hate to keep bringing up the same topics over and over, but if Goebbels taught me anything, it's that repetition will pay off eventually. You may or may not remember that about 1 year ago, the FBI underwent an audit that revealed that they were abusing their powers to spy on law-abiding Americans without just cause. The most blatant abuses had to do with so-called National Security Letters. Basically, the FBI is abusing a power that they should not have in the first place, which is to deny American's to face their accusers in a court of law and every American's right to legal representation. These letters reek of Gestapo-esque activity. So we found out that in 2003-2005, the FBI was breaking the law by abusing the spirit of these subpoenas in order to spy on American's who had not been proved to actually have done anything wrong. What's most interesting to me is that this abuse did not take decades to develop; it happened soon after the FBI - an agency charged with enforcing and upholding the law - got these powers in the Patriot Act.
This is not some abstract theory about the proclivities of law enforcement to abuse power, these are concrete examples. And the treatment that FBI Director Robert Mueller received from Congress for his inability to bring this abuse by his agency under control betrays the true attitude of Congress, which is, "We don't care." Indeed Mueller's audacity is revealed in his recent testimony before Congress in which he tried to direct the focus of the hearing to pushing for Bush's demand for immunity for telecom companies who allowed the FBI to break the law by eavesdropping without a FISA warrant. How ironic is that? This guy should be fired if he won't resign. Only in the Government would such incompetence and flouting of the Law be tolerated.
Here is round 2 of Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps
“Step 2 - Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.”
Impossible you say? Well for starters, check out this story featured on Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life (I know it’s long, but it is an amazing read, or you can order a CD of the episode). These are the stories that the government tries to keep from you. I want to know under what circumstances are the American People ok with detaining these people without charge, without evidence, without access to family, without reasonable access to legal representation and ultimately without conviction, more pointedly, without EXPLANATION! ?! If you read the transcript linked above, you will note that many of the detainees at Gitmo were sold to the CIA for bounties. No proof was needed to confirm the detainees status as either Taliban or Al Qeada. This is eerily reminiscent of the methods used in the Spanish Inquisition. And the path that we are going down may not seem dangerous now, as long as we are only jailing brown skinned Muslims. But what happens when national paranoia reaches a level that neighbors are encouraged to spy on each other, and turn each other in for suspected terrorist activities. Oh wait, we are already there? Can you spot a Terrorist?
It has been too long since my last post, sorry to all you out there who wait with baited breath for my every word to appear on your screen.
I ran across this article on Plastic.com and discovered a concise yet poignant missive on what has been happening to our country since September 11, 2001. I am going to do a series of posts on this article, commenting on each step one at a time. There isn’t a lot to add to what I consider a well written argument. So without further ado, let’s get down to business.
“Step 1 - Invoke A Terrifying Internal And External Enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.”
The reference to the Enabling Act is an important one. The similarity to the USA Patriot Act is striking, especially considering the timing in regards to how quickly they were both passed after a catastrophic event. The Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act both essentially gave the Executive branch open ended War Powers. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror has no discernible end. Unlike the Cold War, we are not fighting one specific ideology. Terror is a tactic used by groups that lack the resources to fight a direct war. It is also known as guerrilla warfare. How can we have an end to a tactic? And because the War on Terror will never end, neither will the emergency powers that were given to the Executive branch. Step 1 is complete, stay tuned for commentary on Step 2 -"Create a Gulag".
When I try to raise concern about the implications of the USA Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, breeches of free speech, and things of this nature the most common argument I hear from others is that “As long as I am not doing anything wrong, what do I have to worry about?” Since theoretical arguments about the nature of power and government do not seem to penetrate the narrow views of said people, I will focus this post on a real world example of the consequences of letting your liberties slip away. I ran across this post on a blog I read every once in awhile. Read carefully, this is not some REAL ID internet rumor meant to stir up hysteria. This is the real world that we have allowed to develop, and actually encourage and defend as “Safe”. While this is going on, we continue to support leaders who claim they are "Protecting the Homeland" (does anyone else think this phrase drips of 1930’s German facist rhetoric, or cold war era communist propaganda?) without giving any critical thought to what we are giving up in order to retain this elusive idea of safety. If I have to appeal to the utterly American ideal of “me first”, then I will. Let’s say your name matches that of a “known terrorist” and you can't fly to your friend’s wedding, your luggage is “lost” or you are otherwise inconvenienced. Well at least its all for a good cause right? At least I will be safe on that airplane, right? The truth, folks, is that we are not guaranteeing anything for ourselves except the slow bleed of our freedoms and liberties. As we continue to argue about whether or not freedom is making progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, our own freedoms are being plucked away from us. These freedoms were not easily won - if you learned anything in school - and they will be lost at an incalculable cost if people don’t stand up and defend the ideals laid down in the Constitution. “When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered” – Dorothy Thompson
I have been too busy to post in the last few days but I am back. I want to talk about a news article I ran across in TIME magazine about the US government’s involvement with “secret prisons” in Ethiopia. Apparently the US continues to deny any wrongdoing or consequential involvement with the practice of torturing suspected terrorists, even in the face of international evidence to the contrary. This administration continues to flout international and domestic law while hypocritically promoting “democracy” and rule of law in a nation that has proved it doesn’t want it. It’s no wonder we are internationally mistrusted and generally despised. These are the kind of actions and policies that promote a general hatred of this nation by “Islamofacists” (to use a term constantly touted by the White House and political Right) and gives them the propaganda that they use to recruit Jihadists. If it was your son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister that was kidnapped, beaten and tortured by a foreign government, wouldn’t you be motivated to do what you could to resist this foreign government that is violating your loved ones? Wouldn’t you support someone who was telling you that they could make it stop? I would. One man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter. And this is why the “War on Terror” will never be won, unless we stop promoting our own U.S. brand of Terrorism.
Breaking news, the Pentagon condemns the use of chlorine in Iraq by insurgents! This constitutes chemical warfare in the eyes of the United States. Everyone needs to express their outrage and hate those stinking terrorists even more! Those soulless beasts will do anything to kill and maim! Quoted, “What you have to understand is that chlorine bombs have more of a psychological effect than they do as a killing effect," said the commander, Maj. Gen. W.E. Gaskin. What will be next?!? Killing babies?
What you as an American need to know is that the Pentagon is hoping you don’t do a little research of your own. Do you know what kind of weapon leaves a terrifying wake, just like chlorine gas? How about white phosphorus? Nothing spells “intimidation” like the sight of a body burned to the bone (warning : graphic picture). But America wouldn’t use such a cruel weapon, a weapon that can kill you by burning off all your skin while you are likely still alive! Oh no? Well the US military is using it in Iraq. Not only that, but it appears that the Pentagon has to lie about it because it is internationally unacceptable to use this weapon against targets where there is a possibility of civilian contact. This weapon is as close to hell as you can get anymore, since napalm was banned.
So while the Pentagon tries to drum up more fury and rage against those awful terrorists for their tactics, take a minute to review their modus operandi and ask yourself, “What is the difference between us and them?”
It looks like Liberals are accepting the pragmatism that they will need to move ahead with pulling the troops out of Iraq. The Democrats, namely Nancy Pelosi, have managed to swing some more votes to their Emergency Funding Bill in the House. I am still not convinced that the House measure is going to do much in the way of actually bringing troops home. It leaves major decisions in the hands of the President as far as determining whether the Benchmarks are met. In a government designed to be slow moving, this process could be prolonged well past the 22 months that Bush has left in office, and long enough to leave the mess to the next president. Besides that, Bush has guaranteed a veto if the bill makes it through Congress. The White House and the Democratically controlled congress are both under intense pressure to get a spending bill through, and unfortunately, it is our troops that hang in the balance. For an excellent commentary on the politics of this fight, click here. Basically, we are quickly approaching a situation where one side or the other will have to back down. And in this intensely charged politically charged debate, there is no telling who has the most guts. The consequence for inaction is a lack of funding for the troops already on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither side wants to be stuck with the political fault for this. This debate and the resulting consequences are sure to have an enormous impact on the ’08 election.
It looks like despite the political tricks, the Democrat's plan for ending funding for the war is stumbling. This is despite intense lobbying by Pelosi and her gang. Democrats are again proving their inability to unite on anything important. While some Democrats say that this bill goes too far by strong-arming the funding for the war, others further left decry that this bill does not go far enough. This is indicative of the way the next 2 years are going to go if Democrats don’t stop bickering amongst themselves and move forward with a real plan. The mission and heart of the Left movement is a noble one. I support bringing the troops home soon and ending this sham of a war. However a real and workable plan is needed. In addition to that, a real and workable plan must be accepted by the entire Party, as well as center leaning Republicans. This just doesn’t seem plausible at this point. There is too much extremism within the Party. Listen up Liberals, we cannot simply pull the troops out tomorrow! There was no plan when the troops went in to Iraq and if we try to leave with the same strategy, there will be untold bloodshed and chaos, both for Iraqis as well as American troops. And there can be no pullout of the troops without unity within the Democratic Party. Failure to progress in this issue will result in certain defeat for the Democrats in 2008. How can they win if they fail to complete the one thing they promised to do?
After running their 2006 congressional campaigns, in part, on a platform of cleaning up politics in Washington and getting rid of legislative bills engorged with special interest spending tacked on, the Democrats are one-upping the former Republican majority with a low down dirty trick (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/19/AR2007031901615.html?nav=rss_politics). While I definitely support pulling out the troops, and while the only way this will happen is for Congress to assert their power over the funding for the War, I strongly disagree with the tactic they are employing here. It gives ammunition to all the Right-wingers to unload on the Democrats for not only going back on their campaign promises, but also using cheap ploys to get the votes they need for their spending bill. This will only hurt them in the long run. Even if the bill passes in both Houses, which seems unlikely given the lack of unity within the Party (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/20/AR2007032000840.html), Bush will most assuredly veto it. Democrats continue to spin their wheels and create more doubt about their ability to run the country. Their seemingly short sighted plans are causing me much frustration.
The ’08 Presidential race is in the early stages of downright nasty-not-niceness. Obama and Clinton are starting to throw the right hooks and haymakers ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/19/AR2007031902165.html?nav=rss_politics ) and the blows are not landing on each other, but rather on the overall chances for a Democratic victory in November 2008. Everyone knows this about the Democratic Party, everyone but the Democrats it seems. Politics is a dirty business and Obama and Clinton are expected to take their shots at each other, but this meaningless bickering between the two camps this early in the game is bound to do more harm than good for both of the candidates and the Party. The strength of the Party is its ability to disagree and present several views that are not conforming to a strict party line. However this is the main weakness of the Party as well. It impedes its ability to gather widespread support from within the Democratic base under one candidate or central idea. Occasionally the Democrats can pull it together enough to do some real politikin’ (Clinton in ’92 : http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/1992/ii921024.html ) but this seems to be a rarity in recent years. Its amazing to me that in this political climate, the Democrats were only able to win a slim majority in the Senate. I wait with cautious optimism to see what unfolds in this early race. Obama ( www.barackobama.com/ ) is my favorite candidate right now and I hope he stays above foolish arguing at this point and garners more support as we approach the primaries (http://www.vote-smart.org/election_president_state_primary_dates.php ).
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