That quote comes from Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article laying out the landscape and prospects of Cheney's drive for war on Iran. Hersh is not hopeful.In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God.”
Bill wore the one hat of man who struggled for justice for working class people in every setting throughout his life. Bill Sorro, Presente!When I go to talk to a city commission, or to the labor council, or a church, I'm not a different person. I'm always the same guy; I wear only one hat. ...
You could say there's a 'selflessness' in working for the community. But I don't feel that. By working for the community, we're working for ourselves.
After 20 tries, I got through to the home of a man who has spent a decade in jail for criticising the regime. He now lives in a dark, thread-bare house in the suburbs.
In precise, detached language he explained that a military response would soon be forthcoming.
"We can only hope", he said, "they will show restraint".
I thought back to a meeting I had at a monastery nearby, and the calm, resigned voice of an old monk.
"The army", he said, "will never run out of bullets"....
And now, despair is creeping into almost every phone call.
One man today was telling me how he had just come home on a bus full of people in tears. Everyone was talking about the way the soldiers had attacked the monks dragging them out of their monasteries.
There is so much anger in Burma right now, particularly about the brutal treatment of the monks.
But, as the crackdown continues, Rangoon seems to be sinking once again beneath its familiar, suffocating blanket of fear.
Apparently Transport Canada is concerned that someone named "Alistair Butt" might try to bring down an airplane. The first two Alistair Butts who presented themselves to fly turned out to be a 10 year old from Saskatoon and a 15-year old from Ontario. [Pictured left. Photo by Jana Chytilova.] Neither seemed much threat to aviation. The Saskatchewan family was furious to hear the airline's proposed remedy: Civil libertarians point out obvious flawsButt was on a list, labelled as a person of interest, said his dad, Usne Butt. ...
What is particularly galling, Major Butt said, is the suggestion from the airlines that perhaps it would be best to change the child's name.
He wrote before the Butts' experience came to light.Just how much is domestic flight safety in peril? How good is the list, developed with the help of the RCMP and CSIS, and will it actually work? How else might it be used? What are the criteria for it?
It's not just racial profiling we should be concerned about, but bureaucratic bungling.
Privacy commissioners weigh inCanada's new no-fly list won't make air travel safer, but it will violate basic principles of justice and fairness. ...
Your name could be on the list already. The government won't allow you to check.
The result is that you could be presumed guilty of an offence serious enough to keep you from boarding an airplane without having the opportunity to hear the allegations against you, confront the accusers or provide evidence to clear your name.
But while you are denied access to the information, the government says it can be shared with foreign governments and agencies, exposing Canadians to a real risk of detention or harassment in other countries. ...
It's important to guard against terror attacks. But it's also important to remember that the purpose of the exercise is to protect our way of life and our values.
Maher Arar knows about watch listsFederal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart and the 12 provincial and territorial information and privacy commissioners and ombudsmen, meeting in Fredericton, unanimously endorsed the call to suspend the no-fly list yesterday. ...
They said the no-fly list involves the secretive use of personal information in a way that will "profoundly impact" privacy and other rights such as freedom of association and mobility rights.
To their considerable credit, Canadians are ashamed and angry that Canadian Maher Arar [pictured with his wife; CP PHOTO/Fred Chartrand] was snatched up by U.S. authorities when in transit through New York and shipped off to Syria to be tortured based on false suspicions emanating from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada's FBI equivalent). The Canadian government has paid the Toronto resident $12 million in compensation. He is still on the U.S. no-fly list.Most Canadians don't want to be pushed around by the angry colossus to the south. Their no fly list sure looks like a concession to the U.S. security theater charade."The security agencies are telling us, 'You should trust us,"' Arar told a group of university students Tuesday.
"My answer to that would be: 'Well, we've seen good examples at the inquiry where we trusted them'."
Documents from the Arar inquiry suggest Canada's spy agency knew he would be tortured in Syria, and then tried claiming national security as an excuse for keeping their involvement secret. ...
He says he's certain that the no-fly list will encounter problems and excesses - and that they will primarily affect Muslim Canadians. ...
"We don't know the names on those lists but it's a fact of life that after the events of 9-11 the Muslim community have been targeted.
"It's safe to assume that most of those names are names of people who have a Muslim background."
The New York Times seems to confirm this today.Jeremy Scahill, author of a terrific book on the Blackwater mercenary army, spoke in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Tuesday to a packed hall. He took questions at the end, and one man asked something to the effect of "Why does the government want to privatize the military? We taxpayers have been paying for the Army." I wished Scahill had pointed out that it's the tax payers who are now paying the private corporations, but the answer Scahill gave was critical.
"There's a cynical answer and an honest answer," he said, "and I think they're the same answer." He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn't make campaign "contributions". But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and give it to private companies, you free it up to come back (some portion of it) to politicians every campaign season.
Nice scam they've got going there, passing our taxes through to the politicians who make their riches possible.The company’s close ties to the Bush administration have raised questions about the political clout of Mr. Prince, Blackwater’s founder and owner. He is the scion of a wealthy Michigan family that is active in Republican politics. He and the family have given more than $325,000 in political donations over the past 10 years, the vast majority to Republican candidates and party committees, according to federal campaign finance reports.
In case you've forgotten, El-Masri was held for five months, during which time he claims he was beaten and sodomized. All by mistake. Earlier this year, U.S. courts threw out his lawsuit seeking damages for his treatment because a public trial would "present a grave risk of injury to national security." The ACLU is appealing.For a moment earlier this year, it seemed as though Germany might turn international relations on their head. A Munich court in January issued arrest warrants ... for 13 CIA agents allegedly responsible for kidnapping a German citizen. The agents are accused of flying him to Afghanistan for interrogation before dumping him on the side of an Albanian road in May 2004 after they realized they had abducted the wrong man.
Now, though, in the face of US intransigence, Germany has backed down. ... in order to avoid a conflict with Washington, Berlin has decided to forgo forwarding a formal request that the agents be arrested.
The White House withdrew its nominee to become the CIA’s top lawyer on Tuesday after Democrats raised concerns that the agency’s interrogation techniques may be illegal. ...
At the hearing in June, Rizzo said he did not object to the 2002 memo that said for an interrogation technique to be considered torture, it must inflict pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” He said he later deemed the document an “aggressive, expansive” reading of U.S. law.
Newport has always told it like it is."I have never seen such devastation, and I've been in war zones," Newport told the joint gathering of bishops and spouses about his first few weeks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. ...
"Every evening, I would just cry, and wonder why there were no mental health experts here to help people get through this. When Columbine happened, that area was saturated with mental health professionals. How can a society like ours not think about mental health professionals, it's just plain racist," he said. ...
He told the gathering that present conditions were created after World War II when, in about 80 percent of the nation's cities, manufacturing and other jobs were outsourced to cheaper labor markets, interstate freeways were constructed and in many cases were built in the heart of black economic districts, effectively killing them and disenfranchising cities. At the same time, he said, real estate developers built suburban shopping malls and most of the white middle class moved away.
"That in a sense removed all the economies from the inner city, all you had left were philanthropy dollars and then they wonder why there's so much crime and violence. It's failed public policy." Newport said. ...
Now, he added: "These cities are time bombs waiting to detonate. In the case of New Orleans, the infrastructure was extremely flawed, there was a poor tax base, the levees hadn't been fixed for years. We wonder sometimes where are our priorities as a society.
"How can we spend trillions of dollars going into war in Iraq at the expense of a country so deteriorated, where our public school system is in such a state of decline?"
Well, we didn't do it and Newport didn't either, but he meant it about seriousness -- and we still need that kind of fire. Glad the bishops got to hear from him.I don't understand you white people. The government in D.C. is making war on some the most important movements of poor people on the planet and you are sitting around talking. If I were you, I'd be organizing people to stop this right now. You hand out all these papers; you could have people out there with torches messing up the ATMs at these banks that pay for this stuff. You could be forcing the government to stop. That's what being serious about liberation would look like. Stop them!
The man is obviously off his rocker. He scares me, appropriately I think.
"Bush: I'm Still Here!" ... He dismissed concerns about lack of political progress in Iraq, saying people there are still recovering from the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein. Then, pounding his lectern, the president said, "I heard somebody say, 'Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas." The actual former South African president, of course, is still very much alive. ...
Ken Herman of Cox Newspapers, who's covered Mr. Bush since before he became governor of Texas, put it to him: "Mr. President, for Republicans seeking election next year, are you an asset or a liability?"
The president didn't hesitate.
"Strong asset," he shot back.
And there's no doubt in the minds of those who cover him that he believes it.
Since this talk was in Berkeley, several questions came at these authors from the left: just what are U.S. "national interests" and are those the same as the worlds peoples' interests? M&W were quite clear on what they consider "U.S. national interests."The Israel lobby is an interest group like any other that tries to influence policy. There is nothing nefarious about their activities; this is what interest groups do. The lobby is not all Jewish; in addition to many Jewish organizations, it is also home to many Christian Zionists.
The United States' unwavering support for Israel against the Palestinians "makes it harder, not easier, to address the problems of the Middle East." For the United States, "Israel is a strategic liability." (Walt)
The lobby is very good at its project of contributing to friendly candidates and pushing legislators to get policies it wants. "Everybody in Congress knows you are playing with fire if you question U.S. support for Israel." (Walt)
Charges of anti-Semitism against critics of the lobby serve to distract from real policy discussions, discourage advocates of other policies, and marginalize those who try to raise criticisms.
"The lobby has pushed U.S. policies in the Middle East into forms that are not in U.S. interests." (Mearsheimer)
It is wrong to claim that most Arabs don't care about the Palestinians. Anger about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians fuels terrorism in Israel and against the United States.
The Iraq war is one of the greatest strategic blunders in U.S. history. The Israel lobby was one (among several) of the authors of that war. Israel has wanted to see the U.S. attack Iran.
The United States should treat Israel like a normal country, not supporting it unless it is in U.S. interests to do so.The United States should push for a just peace between Palestinians and Israel along the lines of Israel giving up the settlements in occupied Palestine and returning to 1967 borders.
When challenged about why Israel and India, countries which never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, should be treated as good guys, while Iran which did sign and has not been proven to be in violation is a pariah, they allowed as how the United States was indeed inconsistent about nuclear weapons.
- keeping oil flowing;
- preventing nuclear proliferation;
- preventing terrorism against the United States.
And these pressures reach down to the local level. I've worked for politicians running for offices no more genuinely important than dog catcher -- and to a man or woman, they believed that they must never utter the slightest question about Israel's virtue even privately or they would be opposed by influential people in their communities who made it their business to police the most local of politicians.I spent almost 20 years as a Congressional aide and can testify from repeated personal experience that Senators and House Members are under constant pressure to support status quo policies on Israel. It is no accident that Members of Congress compete over who can place more conditions on aid to the Palestinians, who will be first to denounce the Saudi peace plan, and who will win the right to be the primary sponsor of the next pointless Palestinian-bashing resolution.
Nor is it an accident that there is never a serious Congressional debate about policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, every President knows that any serious effort to push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement based on compromise by both sides will produce loud (sometimes hysterical) opposition from the Hill.
This kind of bullying behavior just pisses people off. We need the kind of dialogue that Mearsheimer and Walt open up in their world -- and the kind of dialogue the mural opens at the street level....the supporting organization had its funding stalled and agreed to alter the controversial image. ...
The controversy ended up pitting some members of The City’s Jewish community against each other, with some saying the images were appropriate. HOMEY, the organization that received a city grant to create two murals, said the mural was meant to unite the Mission district. Members of the Art Commission simply said the work did what it was supposed to — start a dialogue.
Interpretation here: inadvertently, despite being a Stanford student on the way to a law degree, the complexities of the various immigration statuses available to him tripped him up and he ended up on a deportation track! The rest of his story is, basically, that he would have been tossed out of the country if an appeals judge had not been intrigued to interview this Stanford basketball player and later upheld his appeal.Every immigrant has a story. You see before you an immigrant who was once under an order of deportation. ...
[Born in Span, his family fled the Nazis in 1939, stopping briefly in Cuba where he had citizenship through his deceased father, then coming on to the United States.] So I became a resident alien until 1952.
That year, as a sophomore at Stanford, and a basketball player, I made the Cuban Olympic team that played in the Games at Helsinki, Finland. I left for Havana without getting a re-entry permit, confident I could get a resident visa for return, as I had on earlier trips to Cuba. After the Games, I delayed my return for a year to play basketball in the European league with Real Madrid. When I went to get my visa at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, I was asked why I was returning; I stated to go back to Stanford. I was given a Student Visa. I did not grasp this was a non-resident visa that would interrupt my resident status, until 2 years later whenI attempted to get U.S. citizenship. Through a lawyer I filed an affidavit stating I intended to remain in the U.S.; that prompted the Service to start a deportation hearing.
The rest of Bea's speech is almost as interesting as this anecdote.Only years later, when I started handling a few immigration cases, did I realize how unusual was this appellate finding.
perhaps for fear an IJ might one day sanction one of the government's attorneys. ...
Although the immigration bar certainly has some of the best and most dedicated attorneys, it is also an area that attracts some of the worst. First, the clients tend to be uninformed about how the American justice system operates. They have few connections with business and community leaders who can inform them. They unquestioningly accept whatever the attorney tells them. [And] if malpractice is committed, the likely result is the client is removed...
While he is awfully sympathetic to the idea that felons should be automatically booted out of the country, he wants proper evidence, not assumptions of criminality, to govern the procedures.I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have seen the facts of the crime detailed in a document that we--and YOU--are not allowed to consider in making our determination.
... please remember that aliens are not presumptive criminals and you are not tasked as gate-keepers, your value to be calculated by how many applicants you turn away. By and large, aliens come to this country to work and to raise families, not to plunder and pillage.
He also labels the Democratic presidential offerings "Hillary Edwama."... if Democrats end up nominating a candidate who supports a substantial residual forces plan while thinking that candidate will actually withdraw virtually all troops in a short period of time, then basically our party will have been hoodwinked in a manner not unlike the way the war was first sold to the American public back in 2002 and 2003. While that will be incredibly depressing and infuriating, it also won’t be that much of a huge surprise. After all, most of the Democratic foreign policy elite behind the substantial residual forces plan actually helped sell the Iraq war before it began.
And Gary Kamiya speaks to the urgency of the moment, dismal as it seems:...the Roman Empire on crack cocaine. ...
As it happened, 40 years [after Vietnam], the planet had changed. American military power not only would fail (as in Vietnam) to conquer all before it, but the United States would no longer prove to be the preeminent force on the planet, just the last, lingering superpower in a contest that had ended in 1991. ...
Whatever our country was in my 1950s childhood, Americans were still generally raised to believe that empire was a dreadful, un-American thing. We were, of course, already garrisoning the globe, but there was that other hideous empire, the Soviet one, to point to. Perhaps the urge for a republic, not an empire still lies hidden somewhere in the American psyche.
Let's hope so, because one great task ahead for the American people will be to deconstruct whatever is left of our empire of stupidity and of this strange, militarized version of America we live in.
We need to remember that every American who falls in Iraq is someone's son or daughter. We need to commit ourselves to working with the Iraqis, whom we have so terribly wronged, and with the rest of the world to ensure that our departure will not cause Iraq's people to suffer even more. We need to remember that war is not normal, that it is the worst thing in the world, to be undertaken only in extreme need. And we need to remember that a nation that does not rise up when arrogant and foolish leaders sacrifice its less privileged members is in danger of becoming a nation in name only.
This is no longer about Bush. This is about remaking America.
Nothing against Baptists, but for a "straight talker," McCain has certainly proved to be a squirrelly guy. I believe the former POW used to be against torture as well, until he enabled the Bush Administration's effort to legalize its practice through the Military Commissions Act. Do the Baptists want him?Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has long identified himself as an Episcopalian, said this weekend that he is a Baptist and has been for years.
Campaigning in ... conservative, predominantly Baptist [South Carolina], McCain called himself a Baptist when speaking to reporters Sunday and noted that he and his family have been members of the North Phoenix Baptist Church in his home state of Arizona for more than 15 years.
"It's well known because I'm an active member of the church," the Arizona senator said.
"The President has been allowed to spy on Americans without a warrant, and our U.S. Senate is letting it continue," Richardson said. "You know something is wrong when the New England Patriots face stiffer penalties for spying on innocent Americans than Dick Cheney and George Bush."
I love this simple outreach trick. I'm sure it works on a couple of levels. It gives current members a way to do something really easy that builds their identification with their community organization. And it makes a very simple invitation to the person who gets a card to do something concrete. Offering a meeting is much better than just pointing to a website, even if most recipients are more likely to look at the website.We give every member a handful. I find one on my car every once in a while.
Yes ... we have had people come to a meeting after getting one of these.
The U.S. Census estimates [pdf] that there are roughly 115 million households in the United States. Now those households probably contain a lot less persons than Iraqi households. Let's pretend to correct for that difference by estimating that the U.S. has roughly 57 million Iraqi-size households. If 22 percent of those U.S. households had suffered a death from invasion- and occupation-related violence, 12.5 million of us would be dead. Just to put what we've done in some context.The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful. ...
According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million.
ORB said it drew its conclusion from responses to the question about those living under one roof: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?"
Based on Iraq's estimated number of households -- 4,050,597 -- it said the 1.2 million figure was reasonable. ...
ORB said its poll had a margin of error of 2.4 percent. According to its findings, nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one member to war- related violence, and 22 percent of households nationwide had suffered at least one death. It said 48 percent of the victims were shot to death and 20 percent died as a result of car bombs, with other explosions and military bombardments blamed for most of the other fatalities.
