Cheney Team Trying to Muzzle Al Jazeera

January 30, 2005

Appar­ent­ly the U.S. is pres­sur­ing “Qatar to sell the Al Jazeera TV network”:www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/international/middleeast/30jazeera.html The best line in the New York Times article:
bq. Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald H. Rums­feld, Sec­re­tary of State Con­doleez­za Rice, for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Col­in L. Pow­ell and oth­er Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have com­plained heat­ed­ly to Qatari lead­ers that Al Jazeer­a’s broad­casts have been inflam­ma­to­ry, mis­lead­ing and occa­sion­al­ly false, espe­cial­ly on iraq.
So I sup­pose Cheney, Rums­feld, Rice and Pow­ell have nev­er giv­en out mis­lead­ing or occa­sion­al­ly false infor­ma­tion about iraq?
Al Jazeera is watched by 30 mil­lion to 50 mil­lion view­ers. It’s cov­er­age has been inflam­ma­to­ry and I’m not going to defend that, but it’s the most impor­tant media source in the Mid­dle East and should not be shut down by Amer­i­can pres­sure. Qatar is only con­sid­er­ing sell­ing it, but poten­tial buy­ers for the financially-strapped net­work are few. And the Cheney team would­n’t be involved if they weren’t inter­est­ed in mak­ing it’s con­tent more U.S. friendly.

Why don’t we say that charity and love are Christian issue?

November 3, 2004

In this elec­tion, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives were able to craft a mes­sage mak­ing same-sex mar­riages look like an afront to apple pie and base­ball and of course peo­ple vot­ed against it. What if we could have some­how framed this elec­tion with the details of human suf­fer­ing that these laws suggest?
Now avail­able for the fash­ion­able Bush-era bumper. Pro­ceeds go to sup­port the Non​vi​o​lence​.org websites:
  

Con­tin­ue read­ing

Exporting Prison Abuse to the World?

May 8, 2004

An arti­cle on “abuse of pris­on­ers in the U.S.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp in the _NY Times_ shows that Lane McCot­ter, the man who over­saw the reopen­ing of the Abu Ghraib prison in iraq, was forced to resign a U.S. prison post “after an inmate died while shack­led to a restrain­ing chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suf­fered from schiz­o­phre­nia, was kept naked the whole time.” It was Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Ashcroft who hand-picked the offi­cials who went to iraq.
As an Amer­i­can I’m ashamed but not ter­ri­bly sur­prised to see what hap­pened in the U.S.-run pris­ons in iraq. Mil­i­taries are insti­tu­tions designed to com­mand with force and only civil­ian over­sight will ulti­mate­ly keep any mil­i­tary insi­tu­tion free from this sort of abuse. The “Red Cross had warned of pris­on­er mistreatment”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20040508/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_prisoner_abuse but was large­ly ignored. Abu Ghraib is in the news in part because of a leaked Pen­ta­gon report, yet it’s only after CBS News aired the pic­tures and the New York­er quot­ed parts of the reports and turned it into a scan­dal that Pres­i­dent Bush or Defense Sec­re­tary Rums­feld admit­ted to the prob­lems and gave their half-hearted apologies.
_This is not to say all sol­diers are abu­sive or all prison guards are abusive_. Most sol­diers and most guards are good, decent peo­ple, serv­ing out of call to duty and (often) because of eco­nom­ic neces­si­ties. But when the sys­tem is pri­va­tized and kept secret, we allow for cor­rup­tion that put even the good peo­ple in posi­tions where they are pres­sured to do wrong.
It is pre­cise­ly because the Pen­ta­gon instinc­tive­ly keeps reports like the one on the abuse con­di­tions inside the Abu Ghraib prison secret that con­di­tions are allowed to get this bad. That prison, along with the one at Guan­tanamo Bay remain large­ly off-limits to inter­na­tion­al law. It was prob­a­bly only a few Amer­i­cans that gave the orders for the abuse but it was many more who fol­lowed and many many more – all of us in one way or anoth­er – who have gave the go-ahead with our inat­ten­tion to issues of jus­tice in prisons.

iraqi Prisoner Abuse and the Simulacra of Leadership

May 4, 2004

The Gut­less Paci­fist talks about the abuse of iraqi pris­on­ers and asks How high up does it go?
bq. There are many trou­bling polit­i­cal issues com­ing out of both the reports of abuse in iraq and ear­li­er reports of abuse at Guan­tanamo Bay (which are look­ing increas­ing­ly accu­rate). But what is even more trou­bling to me is the larg­er moral issue that each of us who are Amer­i­cans may be in part respon­si­ble for these atroc­i­ties. For it is we who have allowed a cul­ture of death and vio­lence to develop.
Mean­while, a report on the abus­es by “Maj. Gen. Anto­nio M. Taguba”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894033/ is chill­ing in its detail­ing of phys­i­cal and psy­cholo­gial tor­ture report­ed­ly tak­ing place at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.
Joshua Mic­ah Mar­shal­l’s “Talk­ing Points Memo”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002909 is keep­ing close tabs on devel­op­ments and reac­tions in Wash­ing­ton, includ­ing the President’s:
bq. The dis­as­ters now fac­ing the coun­try in iraq — some in slow motion, oth­ers by quick vio­lence — aren’t just hap­pen­ing on the pres­i­den­t’s watch. They are hap­pen­ing in a real sense, real­ly in the deep­est sense, because of him — because of his atten­tion to the sim­u­lacra of lead­er­ship rather than the real thing, which is more dif­fi­cult and demand­ing, both per­son­al­ly and morally.
Don’t miss Mar­shal­l’s thought­ful com­par­i­son of “Pres­i­dent Bush to a bad C.E.O.”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002906.
The oth­er essen­tial read­ing on all this is Sey­mour Her­sh’s “New York­er arti­cle on the tor­ture at Abu Ghraib”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/.

Google can’t be wrong

December 7, 2003

I usu­al­ly think cyber-pranks are just sil­ly. But I have to laugh at this one: Enough blog­gers have linked to Pres­i­dent Bush’s offi­cial bio with the words “mis­er­able fail­ure” that if you now type that phrase into Google our Pres­i­dent comes up as the very first return. More on this “Google­bomb” from this News­day arti­cle. And just to help the results along, I’ll con­cur that I think he’s a mis­er­able fail­ure.